LCI(L)-92

Then I came across Master Sergeant Kochie, our platoon chief. In the meantime, during the hour or so that I spent, on the seawall, under this German fire, the LCI 92 drifted with the tide, it didn't sink, it drifted on the beach and burned. I could hear the small-arms ammunition on the boat exploding. I was about 500 feet away from it. Sergeant Thomas J. Kochie was a regular Army 30-year man, he was a soldier's soldier, he'd been in the Philippines, he'd been in Hawaii, he could be the model for Private Prewitt in "From Here to Eternity." He had been through it all. He went aboard LCI 92 and got all the equipment off. He got me my radio. He went despite the ammunition and despite the explosions. He also, I found out later, crawled onto the beach exit and started to kill Germans. While I was behind the seawall he gave me my radio and I tried it out and I remember there was a blue haze over the dials. The whole thing was soaked and it didn't work. There was a blue haze over the dials and it had burned out. I started to dig a foxhole and the pebbles kept falling back into the hole. Finally I got the 245, opened it up and piled it full of pebbles to be additional protection.

About 12 o'clock, the machine gun fire kept up. The officers from the 29th were going along the seawall, and anybody they could see from their outfit, they'd chase them over the top, "Get going, go over the top!" And I must admit that I was glad I didn't have to do that, I wasn't trained for it. I stayed where I was and next to me was a guy by the name of Mortimer Roth, a PFC in our platoon, he was a so-called radio operator. He was the only guy in the United States Army when we were called out to go on the trucks to go down to the beach, who turned out without a helmet. I remember that like it was yesterday. The whole platoon roared when Churan asked him, "Roth, where's your helmet?" He kept amusing me, sort of, by counting the shells, like they would whistle overhead and he would say, "One of ours, that's one of ours," and then there were some incoming, "That's one of theirs, that's one of theirs." And he kept counting and I yelled at him, "Shut the fuck up!" At some point he had got burned by a phosphorous grenade, he disappeared out of his foxhole, found a first aid guy and 10 minutes later he was back. He was smeared up in the face like with white, like Coney Island sun cream. Later on he was evacuated. I don't know what happened to him. I think he spent the entire war in the infantry in Europe, whereas we were shipped to the Pacific.

After I got rid of Roth I found my buddy Newman, and he and I sort of stuck together. We were moving around behind the seawall, crawling around. It wasn't too healthy to stand up straight. We kept moving further east toward the other end of the beach, where the 1st Division had landed. But not that far, we were still in the 116th sector. I guess it could have been Easy Green. It seemed to us that it was somehow safer to move down the beach. About 3 o'clock, they landed a British outfit on our beach by mistake. This outfit came off an LCT with trucks and I guess they were some sort of ordnance unit. They had repair trucks, we thought what the hell are they doing here? The Germans started shelling them, very badly. The trucks were hit and soldiers were hit. I remember one soldier running out of the truck burning, his clothes were on fire. Kelly, from our outfit, Corporal Kelly from New Jersey left his foxhole and ran out and rolled this guy in the sand to extinguish the flames. I thought that was brave, that Kelly should have gotten something for that. That's how we spent the afternoon hours, just dodging the shelling.

About 3 or 4 o'clock, I was looking out toward the sea and I saw the Caen promontory jutting out into the sea, into the ocean, it was so damn peaceful. And I said to myself, "What am I doing here? The Germans had a sort of barbed wire obstacle right along the seawall, right along the beach, it was pretty much shot through from our bombardment and their own machine guns. It wasn't neat, it was in tatters, but some guy pulled on the wire and a booby trap exploded further down. Things were exploding all over, the noise was deafening and the stink of burning oil was just overpowering and the tide was coming in and stuff was floating in the water. Dead GIs and parts of boats, cargo, all kinds of stuff was in the water. Toward the evening, when it got to be 4 o'clock, 5 o'clock, Newman and I moved back west toward where the LCI 92 had been beached, toward the Vierville cut. Apparently they had made inroads onto the Vierville road, which we later found out they did.

Newman and I went halfway up the bluffs, we crossed the beach and up the hill about halfway. I saw a German MG-42 and I thought what a marvelous weapon. It was like a Mercedes-Benz. It was well built and it had been abandoned there. I also picked up a German steel helmet as a souvenir and I carried it around and I threw it away after 5 minutes because I had to run for it. I forgot to say that when we moved west a burning barrage balloon came down right where I had my foxhole. That scared me.

So we moved halfway up the hill and it was getting dark. Newman and I started to dig in. There was infantry and there were some officers from the 29th. We never thought that they would chase us off the beach because, despite the shelling and all, I thought that there were troops ahead of us, infantry, ahead of us on the foot roads and that was actually true.

They would prevent a counterattack. I had made up my mind that if the krauts are coming, I'm going to defend myself. We saw a German Heinkel coming at us. It was a twin engine bomber and we saw the fuselage plain as day, he had the bomb bay doors open, he was no more than 1000 feet up, very low. Two engines were howling and I saw the Iron Cross on the fuselage, all of a sudden Newman and I were in this foxhole together, I don't know how we got in there together.

The plane went right straight over us, didn't drop anything, and every gun in the fleet, the machine guns on the LCVPs and the LSTs, opened up, everybody was taking their rage out on this airplane. The thing went right through it, didn't seem to get hit. Disappeared onto the ocean. We met others from my outfit, from the 293rd, and one of them said, just some scuttlebutt, "I just heard from an infantry colonel, there's 8 men between us and the Germans." So I thought, well, that's great. Troops had been coming in all day despite the shelling. That evening, there were already quite a few on the beach.

In the morning, the shelling wasn't bad, but there was still a lot of sniper fire. We went onto the road, onto the Vierville road. We passed at the bottom of the hill there were more German bunkers and from one of the bunkers a bunch of Germans came out with their hands up.

They were white in the face from the reverberation of the shelling of the cement in the bunker. They were scared as hell. I spoke German to them but they didn't understand German too well, probably they were what they call "Beufegermanen," captured Germans. They were from Poland, someplace, draftees, young kids most of them. I made them squat, I made them empty their pockets and they had "kennkarten" and a few pfennig, and they put it all in front of them. And I looked at this stuff and said, "What am I going to do with this shit?" And I told them in German, "Put it away," and then my buddy Wrobleski from Pennsylvania was standing there with an M-1 and a bayonet and he looked at them and he looked at me and he says, "If you want me to kill them, I'll kill them. Just tell me." I said, "Don't kill them." And I told them to get up and form a file and I marched them down to the beach, in German, [left, right, left, right - in German] and turned them over to one of the, there were no MPs yet, but turned them over to one of the LCVPs that were leaving the beach. I explained that to them. Later on, there were regular German speaking troops. They had one guy who was wounded.

His leg was twisted, his left leg was twisted in 180 degree. In other words, one leg was face out and the other leg was also facing out, facing in the same way. He was in great pain and he was yelling "Mother, Mother!" Their noncom told two of them to get a door from a building and they found a door, from this very house that we've seen in photos, this house that was shot to pieces. They found a door, put him on a door, and then I told him to get the hell on the beach. I gave this noncom my canteen to give this guy water. I told them to get on the beach and get on an LCVP.

At that point, there was a man from the 116th, an infantryman, and he was in a rage, he was not all there, and he said to me, "These son of a bitches shot my buddies and I'm going to shoot them." He cocked his M-1 and I thought, oh my God. And I told this German noncom "Hau ab," and I told this GI, "Listen, buddy, hold it." And I separated them. I think I prevented a war crime right there. I told the German, in German, to get the hell out of there, march down, get on an LCVP. This was in the morning of the second day. There was still a lot of sniper fire.
There were quite a few from our platoon we assembled and we took over an abandoned German bunker about 500 or 1000 feet away from the Vierville exit. At the same place where there is now a monument to the 6th Engineer Special Brigade. It was nicely done but they hadn't had time to finish it. We put our stuff in there. We got working radios and set up. Before we did that, Newman and I were on the bottom of the hill, maybe 500 feet further east, toward the British sector. By that time we had not eaten for 48 hours. Then Newman found a can of British field rations. It had a fuse and would heat itself up by a burning fuse going through the center of this can. He didn't know how to do this, well, I did it, I pulled the cord and I burned the whole thing up. The whole thing was burned, I didn't do it right. We ate the burned food. Newman was cursing me up and down for screwing it up. But that was the first food we had. It wasn't really food, it was just burned crap. And that was shortly before we found the rest of the outfit and got into this bunker and set ourselves up.

Also, just about at that time, there was a German sniper who kept pinging away right above our heads. After awhile, we wouldn't hear him for awhile, but then he would ping again. Somebody with a Jeep brought up an ack-ack wagon, a trailer, with 50s. He used these 50s to rake the hill there. He raked the location where that sniper was and we were yelling with joy, finally somebody's doing something here. I remember we were applauding this guy, yelling, "Great! Wonderful! Give 'em hell!" I don't know whether he actually killed the sniper, but this was great. Apparently they had an artillery observer somewhere because a destroyer came at high speed and he fired all his guns and in 10 minutes that German artillery was silent. Apparently somebody had spotted it and was giving fire directions to this destroyer. Also on the second day, the Indianhead Division started to move through the exit. It was the eastern exit, looking at the plan in the Ambrose book, it was the center exit. From then on, that was end for the krauts there on the beach.

I also have to tell this. There was a corpse right on the beach, on the seawall, and this corpse was lying not far from the destroyed tank that I mentioned. This corpse was that of an officer and he had the stars, I couldn't believe my eyes, this was a Brigadier General, the corpse. I passed this corpse several times and the last time I passed it, some son of a bitch had stolen the stars. I was outraged. If I had seen this, I would've shot the guy. Some bastard had pilfered the corpse. Also at the bluff that morning, on the 7th, saw two paratroopers from the 101st, and they were sitting against the rocks there where we had spent the night.

They were in very bad shape and they needed water. At that time the snipers were still pretty strong. Some guy from another outfit, a sergeant, ran to the beach to try to get water for them. They were shooting at him like a turkey shoot and he zig zagged, it was like in the movies. You could see the dust kick up at his feet. And he made it, back and forth. He came back with water. They were unable to pick him off. They had the whole beach under observation and under fire so anything that moved on the beach they were able to shoot at. I must say that nothing much moved through that exit that I remember, until later.

There was a big pile of gravel right at that exit right next to some unfinished bunker that the Germans had left there. There was a guy lying there pointing his rifle toward the inland, toward the beach road. I crawled up next to him and I was going to use my rifle, and I noticed that this guy was dead. He was killed just lying there on that gravel. And I stayed there, but I didn't see any Germans. This was all on the morning of the second day. That was before I got these prisoners.
As I said before, in the course of the second day things were getting more and more civilized and the 2nd Division came in, a lot of troops came in. Things quieted down, there were just snipers left. There were attempts to start taking up the bodies. I remember that the bodies were stacked one on top of each other, just the shoes sticking out. I'm still wondering who that Brigadier General was and I hope he's been properly identified. One thing I noticed, everybody on the beach, all the ones that had been landed in the first day, and even in the second day, the fear was such that everybody looked the same to me. They had yellow faces. I guess this was from the adrenaline. I guess fear did that.

That's what I remember about D-Day itself and the day after. After that, we organized very rapidly and we set up the Beachmaster communications as we were supposed to. I did duty on ships communicating from ship to shore through the Beachmaster's office. The Beachmaster's office was a bunker on the beach where all the communications were concentrated - telephone, radios, messengers, and a message center where they decoded messages and so on. The job was to get the cargo out of the holds of these ships and onto the beach. By that time they were installing the Mulberry harbor. They had taken old ships and sunk them in a semi-circle around the beach, so that it was like a protected harbor. I remember them blowing these ships and sinking them. The ships, many Liberty ships, pulled into the harbor. They unloaded them with DUKWs.

- The preceding is from an excerpt of "Soldiers' Stories: Fritz Weinshank"


	\| Home Page \| Ship Specs \| Ship History \| Ship Photos \| Crew Photos \| Crew Today \| Ship's Log Part 1 \| Ship's Log Part 2 \| Ship's Log Part 3 \| Coxswain Duties \| Soldiers' Diary \| Soldiers' Story Part 1 \| Soldiers' Story Part 2 \| Action Reports \| D-Day Story \| D-Day Photos \| Citation \| Related Sites \| USCG Posters \| Sign Guestbook \| View Guestbook \|
	Copyright © 2002 All rights reserved