“I got some of the shrapnel — it hit my back and I landed right on my face. I fell down in the sand and thought I was dead,” Lt. Sid Salomon recalled. “Right then and there, I said to myself that I wasn’t going to die. This was no place to be lying, so I took my maps, I got up, and ran toward the overhang of the cliff.”
Today, June 6, is the 79th anniversary of the fateful Allied D-Day landings in Normandy that spelled the beginning of the end for the Nazis. Historian Patrick K. O’Donnell shared with Breitbart the stories of several heroic members of the U.S. Army Rangers, who led the way on bloody Omaha Beach that morning in 1944. The 2nd and 5th Ranger Battalions, divided into three groups, were set to take the “deadly” German mortars to Omaha’s far left. As remembered by Ellis “Bill” Reed, General Cota called to his men on Omaha Beach in the words that became the Army Rangers’ motto: “Rangers, lead the way!”
That’s just what the Rangers did. Reed’s job was to torpedo a hole in the concertina wire to allow other men an egress, which he did successfully under heavy fire. “I was told to fire the rifle grenade at a machine gun nest, but like everything else in the U.S. Army, it was a big dud,” Reed described the nightmarish situation with a touch of humor. “So at that point, Lieutenant Dawson got up and charged it with his submachine gun and kept blasting. When we got up close they put their hands up. I remember that one German had his arm dangling by only a piece of flesh. That was our first visual face-to-face contact with the enemy.”
Ranger Ray Alm, who landed on Omaha’s Dog Green Beach, recalled the horrific casualties starting from when the Rangers were wading in to the beach. “My two best buddies were right in front of me, and they were both killed,” he said. “It was terrible; there were bodies all over the place. They wiped out almost the entire 116th Infantry Regiment; they just murdered them. They were floating all over the place, there was blood in the water — it was just dark.”
But come hell, Nazis, or high water, the Rangers were determined to finish their mission. Lt. Salomon was one of the first Rangers on the beach. He dragged wounded Sergeant Reed through the water with him to the beach and then was struck in the back with shrapnel from a mortar shell that “killed or wounded all of my mortar section.” Lying on his face, Salomon decided, “I wasn’t going to die.” An aid man dug the shrapnel from his back and Salomon, nothing daunted, began to climb the cliff.
“We went up on toeholds and by digging our fingernails and bayonets into the cliff,” said Salomon. Only nine out of 37 men in Salomon’s company survived the climb, and not all of them survived the next phase. He and another Ranger took a German soldier prisoner. “We proceeded to knock out a machine gun section and a mortar section. … We knocked out the German position and figured that we were doing our best by still holding our ground,” Salomon said.
Salomon, Reed, and Alm are just three of the thousands of Americans (including my own great-uncle Jack Corley) who stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. Today we remember and honor all those who fought and died that day so that freedom could survive in the world.
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