When Pvt. Charles “Harry” Heinlein of Baltimore left a packed Queen Mary
ocean liner for the port at Greenock, Scotland, in October 1942, a bagpipe
band greeted him and his nearly 7,000 mates from the U.S. Army’s 29th
Division. He’d never imagined such sad, strange, exotic sounds. Gripping his
duffel and heading for the trains south, he had no clue that 19 months later,
he would be asked to take part in a seaborne invasion of the Continent, one a
commanding officer would describe as “the most important military operation
in the history of the world.”
In fact, top Allied brass had not yet envisioned Operation Overload, let
alone mapped it in all its intricate detail. From Supreme Allied Commander
Dwight D. Eisenhower on down, they realized that assaults from the sea against
entrenched enemy defenses had always bordered on the suicidal.
By the time Heinlein would be asked to become a part of the first wave of
the grandest, most hazardous, most consequential invasion ever attempted, the
enemy would have had four years to dig in.
Ike and the others strategists also knew that the Allies could only succeed
at such an audacious plan if the men carrying it out believed in their souls
it was possible. Though Harry was but a private, one of 35,000 men to hit
Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, the year and a half spent on the cold, soggy
moors of southern England prepared him and his mates in the 29th for just such
a job — and convinced them that they, and they alone, could pull it off.
Harry had joined the Army because that’s what America’s young men did if they
had an ounce of patriotism.
But as he wedged himself and his gear into the cramped compartment of a
British train headed for Wiltshire County, 75 miles west of London, he wasn’t
thinking on such a grand scale. He watched neat cottages, tidy gardens and
undulating countryside pass by as he rattled toward Tidworth, the old British
Army barracks not far from Stonehenge that served as the Americans’ base of
operations.
Before long, Heinlein’s regiment, the 116th Infantry, was sent another 150
miles west, to various training camps among England’s southwestern counties.
Company D, Harry’s 180-man heavy-weapons unit, was assigned to a base near the
town of Ivy Bridge in Devon.
There to train him were Capt. Walter Schilling, the high-standards
commander of Company D, and farm boy Lt. Verne Morse, who ran Harry’s 40-man
platoon. He learned right away that this wasn’t Fort Meade.
Today, those who survive — about 20 from his original company — still talk
about the marches. Twice a week, the wiry, bespectacled Schilling and the
hulking, red-headed Morse would drive Harry’s platoon on 30-mile hikes across
the inhospitable moors. Fifteen miles out, says Harry, and 15 miles back. Each
GI lugged his full 60 pounds of gear; Harry had more, including the 51-pound
tripod for his squad’s machine gun, which itself weighed in at 100 pounds.
Some days featured the dreaded speed-marches. The men had four hours to
cover 16 miles. Harry was one of the few who never got a blister; many had to
remove their Army-issue brown shoes after the ordeal and soak their bloodied
feet.
In that odd little region of Dartmoor, the land was lonely and desolate.
The rain is constant, falling at a rate of 100-plus inches per year in some
places. It makes the soil mushy, which can soak boots clean through. The wind
gusts so hard that trees can’t survive infancy. Sometimes, Harry’s squad was
lashed together with rope, 12 guys becoming, quite literally, a unit. “If you
didn’t do that, you could drop into one of those bogs and never be seen
again,” he says.
The English wouldn’t train there at all and marveled that the Yanks even
tried. “They thought we were nuts,” Harry says with a laugh. “It wasn’t good
enough for the Brits, but it was fine for the 29th. By the time we left, we
were in some kind of condition.”
A unit takes shape
The 29th, 14,000 strong, had never seen a shot fired in anger, which was
one reason their C.O., the feared and flamboyant Maj. Gen. Charles Gerhardt,
considered discipline indispensable. “If you fell out — if you got a blister,
got hurt, couldn’t finish for whatever reason, and you had to be brought to
the aid station by ambulance — they didn’t look kindly on that,” says Harry.
“They’d make you dig those 6-by-6-by-6-foot garbage pits. The worst was, you
had to go back out that night and do the whole march over from the beginning.
Kept you motivated.”
Gerhardt made platoon leaders weed out the less than perfect: In some
companies, 50 percent were reassigned. That only inspired Heinlein and his
mates in Company D, like buddy Winnie Wieskamp, to work harder, and work
together. Elmer Teets, a 36-year-old private, couldn’t finish the marches, so
Harry humped half his gear. “You came through all that with your unit, like in
my case, Winnie and Elmer, and you wanted to keep your family in one piece.”
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Sometimes the orders were strange. Harry still puzzles over the time when,
out on maneuvers in Cornwall, he had to dive into a frigid swimming pool. He
didn’t know it was part of Gerhardt’s obsession with ensuring that his men,
infantrymen who would perform a marine operation, could swim.
Life took a clearer shape as Harry learned his job, his officers, his place
in the scheme of things. Captain Schilling, the 34-year-old Virginian who
oversaw D Company and its 180 soldiers, and Lieutenant Morse, the gung-ho
leader of Harry’s platoon, kept order. He knew every D Company mate by sight,
if not name; every platoon mate personally, including a new pal, a slight,
wiry replacement from the farmlands of Michigan named Joe Walentowski; and
every member of his 12-man squad as a brother. “You hear it over and over
again,” he says, “but it’s true. Those guys become your family. That was the
feeling that got you through.”
Walentowski, especially, felt like Harry’s sibling. The son of a General
Motors worker, he was the 13th of 16 kids. He’d left school at 16 to help
support the family, baling hay and digging potatoes in the rich, dark farmland
south of Detroit. Barracks life was nothing to Joe, long used to sleeping four
to a bed.
Incessant drill schooled them in weapons and tactics. Every infantryman had
to learn to use every available weapon. Harry was marksman enough with the
Browning M1917 machine gun that he became a No. 1 gunner, the man who pulled
the trigger. He had to learn how to take the “receiver” apart and put it back
together blindfolded; that because it was water-cooled, the gun could fire two
minutes or more before overheating; that it fired 450 rounds a minute,
compared with the 1,200 attainable by the Germans’ MG 42; and that it could
hit a target at 800 yards. Like most GIs, he learned his way around
semi-automatic rifles (Browning and M1), .45 pistols and grenades.
Morse, an athletic, long-legged Pennsylvanian of about 25, walked so fast
on marches that Harry sometimes had to jog to keep up. Schilling had been with
the Virginia National Guard since the mid-1930s, making him one of the few who
stayed in fighting trim during a period between wars. Schilling, a Lucky
Strikes addict, had trouble on marches but always kept up. “Captain Schilling
loved the Army,” says Harry. “He never ‘showed his stripes,’ never asked you
to do things he wouldn’t. He was tough enough to scare you, but he was fair.”
One day, for no apparent reason, he had the men pair off and do some
boxing. Unaware that Heinlein and Wieskamp were best buddies, he handed the
two their gloves and told them to go at it.
“Man, you think you’re a guy’s friend,” says Harry. “I can’t remember who
hit who first, but when a pal hits you, it really makes you mad. You see
stars. In a minute or two, we were flailing away. [Schilling] hollered, ‘Break
it up, you S.O.B.s, before I court-martial you!’ and got between us.
“Funny thing was, afterward, I said to Winnie, ‘Why’d you hit me so hard?’
He said the same thing to me. We were laughing so hard. We were even better
friends after it was all over.”
‘A little trouble’
Young men on the moors had to find entertainment, sanctioned or otherwise,
and Harry often hit a favorite Ivy Bridge pub, the King’s Arms, with Wieskamp,
Walentowski or other guys. The Brits served beer warm, but Scotch was only a
dollar a bottle, before incoming Yanks flooded the area. The local girls liked
the boys in their uniforms and seemed to share a fantasy that they were rich
Americans. “We didn’t even understand British money,” shrugs Harry. “We’d put
it in our hand, hold it out and say, `Here, take what you need.’ Dumb, huh?”
One night, Harry and Winnie, tired of the King’s Arms scene, set out on
foot to a town 15 miles away. At a pub there, they lost track of time. A
furious Schilling noticed they were missing at bed check, and he and his first
sergeant hit the countryside in the captain’s Jeep.
The two miscreants saw the headlights coming, jumped a fence by the side of
the road and hid in some undergrowth. As the car drew near, they looked at
each other.
“Might as well give it up,” they agreed with a shrug.
They got in. On the five-mile ride back, no one said a word.
Next morning, Schilling called for early inspection. The men of D, in
regulation fatigues, raced to their positions — all but the two buddies, who
had sacked out in dress uniforms.
“All right, you bastards, I want to see you both in my office!” roared the
commander.
All this time later, Harry is loath to share what happened next. As he
strolled in, he committed a sin so basic it’s almost unspeakable: He forgot to
salute. Worse, he laid a hand on the captain’s desk and assumed a decidedly
slumping posture.
“You’re in trouble, son,” the captain said.
Harry doesn’t recall the exact findings of the disciplinary hearing.
“Everybody got in a little trouble once in a while,” he says with a wince.
What he does know is that if Schilling had let the incident pass, he’d have
lost respect for his commander.
Afterward, Schilling never brought it up again. He never treated Heinlein
differently. “That sank in,” says Harry. “He was the kind of man you wanted to
fight for.”
Mock assaults
By June of 1943, the Americans and British had begun making tentative,
classified plans for Operation Overlord.
By that time the British had given the Americans a stretch of beach on the
coast of Devon that would help turn thousands of regular infantrymen into what
amounted to marines specially trained for amphibious assault. In three-week
courses at the U.S. Army Assault Training Center, the 29ers learned
specialized weaponry and tactics one regiment at a time. Harry worked with
plastic explosives (effective on pillboxes), bangalore torpedoes (for cutting
through barbed wire) and flame throwers. His 116th Infantry Regiment ran
landings on the beach there, operations in which they came ashore in new craft
such as LCTs (Landing Craft, Tank) and practiced zigzagging across sand.
Even in his sometimes precarious health, Schilling hit the beach with his
men, even taking to the frigid, chest-deep water, his carbine overhead, and
camping with them on the moors afterward.
By the spring of 1944, the 29th was taking part in full, dress-rehearsal
invasions at a Devon beach called Slapton Sands that, they would learn, was
“supposed to look like Normandy, only without the bluffs,” says Harry. The
maneuvers featured ground-shaking live fire directed over the men’s heads from
warships offshore, climbing onto the beach from the landing craft and zigzag
crawling. “You definitely got the feel of a landing,” says Heinlein.
The missions themselves were dangerous. The Channel was rugged water, the
troops susceptible to enemy attack. One night in April, several German E-boats
— swift, nearly invisible torpedo vessels — appeared out of nowhere and opened
up on a convoy of eight landing craft, sinking two and crippling a third.
More than 700 U.S. Army soldiers and nearly 300 U.S. Navy sailors died. For
security reasons, the incident was kept secret until the war was over.
The plan revealed
When a few big-time generals were transferred to Britain from the
Mediterranean theater, rumors flew that something big would happen soon. Lt.
Gen. Omar Bradley, commander of the U.S. 1st Army and an unrivaled judge of
combat readiness, observed the 116th Infantry and chose it to join the 16th
Infantry of the 1st Division, a combat-hardened unit, for the crucial job of
hitting Omaha Beach first. Together, they would form the point of the Allies’
spear.
In early 1944, Eisenhower himself was transferred to Britain to lead
Operation Overlord, and Britain’s top general, Bernard Montgomery, inspected
troops in Cornwall.
That May, without warning, the entire 29th Division was put in truck
convoys that rumbled south. Some guessed it was an elaborate Slapton Sands
exercise, but when Harry’s 116th arrived at a sealed camp near the port city
of Weymouth, something was obviously different. Harry Heinlein – No. 1 machine
gunner, 1st Squad, 1st Platoon, Company D of the 116th, the legendary
“Stonewall Brigade” – and the rest of the “Blue and Gray” were set up in
marshaling areas, behind sentries and barbed wire, under strict orders not to
leave or communicate with anyone outside the camp.
Very few in the upper echelons of the 29th had been privy to the D-Day
plan; here, they shared it with the rest of the division. They would invade
Calvados Beach, which for no reason of significance the Yanks code-named
Omaha, on June 5, 6 or 7. Schilling and his fellow company commanders showed
their men scale models of the terrain, accurate right down to the rocks,
seawalls and machine-gun pits.
As zero hour neared, the Blue and Gray were anxious, cocky, bored. “We knew
what to expect over there,” says Heinlein. “We knew our training was good and
knew we were going to win. The problem was being keyed up for battle but
having to sit there and wait.
“When he’s ready to go, a soldier can’t stand to sit and wait.”
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Within days, Private Heinlein found himself marching through Weymouth to
the cheers of the citizens and boarding HMS Empire Javelin, the transport ship
that would take 1,600 men from the 116th to a carefully chosen point in the
English Channel, 11 miles off the coast of Normandy.
‘The last supper’
Eisenhower chose June 5, 1944, as the day the Allies would launch their
assault. The cooped-up men had several days to wait. As the night of June 4
arrived, and they steeled themselves for the invasion, high winds rocked the
Javelin, a sign of a huge storm brewing across the whole channel. Heinlein
remembers it as if it happened six weeks ago.
“We were supposed to stay below deck that night,” he says, “but for some
reason, nobody wanted to go down. Some fellows were worried a sub would hit us
and didn’t want to be trapped. Some, I think, just wanted to be out there and
breathe the air. We were talking about this and that, you see, all the
training we went through together, how well prepared we were, what was about
to happen.
“A lot of the men knew they weren’t going to make it. Some of them were
saying so that night. They were giving other fellows their family’s address,
saying, ‘Send this or that to my mom or my sister; I’m not going to need it
after tomorrow.’ There was a feeling of doom.
“I didn’t feel that way. I didn’t let negative thoughts in. But a lot of
men did.”
After 18 months of C and K rations, and “spams and jams,” the Army laid out
a spread of steak and potatoes – what Harry, Winnie and Joe called “the last
supper.” He doesn’t remember how it tasted, but like most survivors who were
there, he remembers the company commander inviting all of D Company below
decks.
As the 180 men crowded inside and curled up on the floor, they saw the
reflection on Captain Schilling’s wire-rimmed glasses as he lit one of his
endless series of Lucky Strikes.
They could smoke, too, he said, this once.
This wasn’t Fort Meade anymore, he said. It wasn’t Slapton Sands. It was
the real McCoy, what they had trained for. If they kept their wits about them
and remembered their training, they’d do America proud.
Then he made a statement many who survived would remember for the rest of
their lives.
“Cross the beach fast,” he said. “Gain the high ground, and get into a
perimeter defense. … When I call the roll tonight in Isigny [above and west
of Omaha Beach], I want everyone to say, ‘Here!'”