James “Bud” Roberts remembers D-Day as if it were yesterday.
“I think about it a lot,” said Roberts, 92, who was part of a five-man mortar team that landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy 70 years ago today. “I lost so many buddies, buddies that didn’t make it, that didn’t come back home.”
Roberts, a graduate of Valley High School in Carroll County, was part of the fifth wave of troops, which landed at 7:20 a.m. — 50 minutes after the first Allied soldiers stepped ashore in Nazi-occupied France.
Roberts said his unit, the 81st Chemical Mortar Battalion, fired the first American shell on French soil during World War II. He said the troops climbed down the ropes of their ship into their landing craft on June 6, 1944, “just like it was one of those training missions.”
As the landing craft approached the shore, the men stood up to see what was happening. “We didn’t know how many bullets and shells were hitting the beach,” Roberts said.
As they got closer, bullets from German machine guns started hitting the small craft, and Roberts said he and the other soldiers thought, “This is it.”
While still a ways out, the coxswain, or pilot, of the landing craft reached a predetermined point and dropped the ramp — directly in line with a German pillbox.
Roberts was in for another surprise: The men ran off the landing craft straight into neck-deep water. Fortunately, Roberts, a corporal, and his crew were wearing life preservers. They also had placed life preservers on their primary weapon, a 4.2-inch mortar, to keep it from sinking.
Two soldiers were needed to carry the mortar’s base, and another two were needed to carry its barrel assembly. Roberts carried the mortar’s sight.
The fire from the German machine guns was intense, he said.
“There were so many bullets hitting the water, it looked like hail,” he said. “Those .50 caliber bullets were hitting everywhere. ... My four boys got hit, not real bad, but they were wounded.”
The soldiers refused to be treated for their wounds, saying they had to get the mortars out. For their bravery, all four received the Distinguished Service Cross, Roberts said.
As Roberts and his men made their way to the beach, they saw the carnage of the four waves that preceeded them. They had to climb over bodies, and no amount of training had prepared them for that, he said.
“It was disheartening to see so many dead folks,” he said. “They were floating in the water and on the beach.”
Still, the mortar crews had an important job — providing close artillery support for the troops as they advanced up and off the beach.
“The reason we were in deep water — the ones we were supporting were still on the beach,” he said. “We had to wait until they occupied some territory and then have them fall back for us to have a target to shoot. ... It was around noon before we ever fired a shot.”
The deadly machine gun nests and other obstacles were fired upon by a U.S. Navy destroyer whose commander disobeyed orders in order to help the troops on the beach, he said.
Roberts said as he crouched down behind a German obstacle for cover, Maj. Gen. Norman Cota arrived on the beach and rallied the troops hunkered down there.
“He got his pistol and started firing,” Roberts said. “He said, ‘Y’all have got to get up off your butts; we’ve got to kill some Krauts. There ain’t nobody here but dead folks and the ones that are going to die.’ He said, ‘Let’s go!’”
Cota’s leadership and brash talk got the troops to advance.
The GIs got another break when two of 29 “swimming” tanks finally made it ashore. One of the tanks, equipped with a flamethrower, soon disabled the pillbox that had hampered the soldiers’ advance.
Roberts said the GIs advanced three miles inland before a German counterattack pushed them back.
Roberts said he spent his first night in France on the bluff overlooking the beach where Germans had stood the night before.
The advance off Omaha Beach didn’t meet Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s plans, but it was aided in part by Adolf Hitler’s arrogance, Roberts said. Hitler disregarded German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s request for more troops — 200,000 of them in reserve — thinking that the real attack was going to be led by U.S. Gen. George Patton and that Normandy was just a diversion.
“If he’d let all those other troops come to Omaha, I don’t believe we would have made it,” Roberts said.
• Contact Bob Darden at 581-7239 or bdarden@gwcommonwealth.com.
