OMAHA BEACH: Last Living 1st Wave D-Day Officer on Storming Normandy | John C. Raaen

We passed landing control, which are boats about a thousand yards offshore, and they said do not attempt to land at Vierville. The casualties are 95 percent, half of them killed. Land on Dog White Beach, so we shifted over to Dog White Beach, and we landed our first wave there. Two companies of the second battalion plus the headquarters boat, and they were cut like everybody else on Omaha Beach. They were cut down to about 50 percent. All the officers killed or wounded. You are about to embark upon the great crusade to meet this mounting aggression, and make no mistake about it, good I was born at Fort Benning, Columbus, April 22, 1922. And your father was in the service, correct? My father was a graduate of what they now call the class of June 1919. Now you grew up in a military family, of course, and your family had regular interaction when you were a kid with figures who would become extraordinarily famous later on, right? Oh yes, yep. I knew Eisenhower. I knew Bradley. I even double dated with Bradley's daughter. Johnny Eisenhower was a friend of mine from junior high school. We also, he was in my company at West Point, as was Georgie Patton, as was Mark Clark. Arnold was in B company. I was in A, so I knew all of these people. I knew their fathers. I knew their fathers when they were lieutenants, that type thing. Played tennis with them, played golf with them, and later their four stars, things like that. It was a very, very useful growing up period, living on army posts, because you did meet all these people when they were lieutenants, when they were captains, and so on. So, like your father, you went to West Point. You began there in early July of 1939. Correct. You're there for two months. Two months later, Hitler invades Poland, World War II in Europe begins. A couple years into your time at West Point, Pearl Harbor, we're in the war. What's it like to be at West Point when all these major events are happening, and you probably know you're going to be in the middle of it soon? Well, the point is that we contracted not expecting war, but when the war came, that's what we were preparing for. So, it went very well. It made you quite a bit more attentive to your studies, particularly your military studies, things like that, but it really didn't change anything. We're the same happy-go-lucky people we would have been without a war. And you were commissioned in 1943 with an engineering degree that actually helped you get in with the Rangers. Explain that a little bit. Well, in a sense, I'm afraid there was a little exaggeration there. It didn't help me, but it didn't prevent me. I was an engineer officer, and the Rangers were infantry, but when they sought volunteers for the Ranger Battalion, I went ahead and volunteered, and lo and behold, I passed the personal interview and found myself in the Rangers. And the excuse was that being an engineer officer, I knew about field fortifications, I knew about minefields, I knew about barbed wire, I knew about all kinds of things, engineering. Demolitions was another one, things like that. And they said, we need somebody who specialized in those things in the Rangers. So, I expected to be in headquarters and so on. First thing they do is throw me out in a Ranger platoon, and I'm in the Ranger platoon for about two, three months. And they moved me up to staff where I really belonged. When did you head to England? We headed to England in early January of 1944. I say early January, we docked in Liverpool on January 19th, which was exactly one year after I graduated from West Point. So, January 19th is the big day for me because of the other association. Definitely. And so, what did you do to prepare then for the invasion that you knew was coming? Well, we went initially to Lemster, England, which is over on the Welsh border. And we trained, much of it was physical training. I mean, we knew our mission involved a long march, a fast march. So, there was a tremendous amount of marching, night marching, distance marching, double time marching, and things like that to get in physical condition. They had rifle ranges, and we had to all qualify with our own weapon. We had to qualify expert. And we did a lot of scouting and patrolling. But the nastiest thing that we had to do was somebody coming up, flashing a map in front of us and saying, you are there, get there within nine hours, period. Goodbye. No bus tickets, no nothing. You could hitchhike, you could jump the railroad and do all sorts of things to get there. But everybody succeeded. We also did a great deal of training with landing craft. They brought the ships in that we would use in the invasion, and they brought the landing craft in that we would use in the invasion. And as a result, when we actually loaded out for the invasion, we knew half the people we were dealing with in the Royal Navy, because the Rangers all used Royal Navy transport to get to the beaches. And we used Royal Navy boats, things like that. And we were very lucky, because they had done it before. They'd done it in Africa, they'd done it in Sicily, they'd done it twice in Italy, and so on. And knowing them, we got along very well. Very few hitches, none with the English crew, none absolutely. What kind of resistance were you told to expect? Well, we were told to expect that the bombing of the beaches would leave us plenty of good cover. The cover, if it were on the beaches, a bomb crater, would be filled with water, but it was better than being up on the sand. So that was the type thing we expected for ourselves. We expected a seawall. We expected enemy wire. We expected mines, mostly anti-personnel mines, but mines, things like that. But that's what we trained for. We also expected very hostile positions of the enemies on the crests, that they would have trenches, they would have minefields, they would have wire in front of the minefields, things like that. We did not expect an easy show. When did you actually find out what your assignment was, what you had been training for all this time? Not until we got on board the ships. We got maps of the entire area. When we were still ashore in the Dorchester camps, we had these wonderful maps without a word on them. You didn't know the name of that town, you didn't know the name of that locale, you didn't know the name of the woods that were on the map. All you saw was the maps. And we memorized those maps. And the sand tables were the same way. They had no names. All you were doing was you were memorizing the terrain, which is what we all did. And I mean, the enlisted men, they learned it as much as we officers, because they were sitting right beside us. As we got the information from the maps, we had wonderful aerial photos. And the aerial photos were of such a scale that, I mean, you could practically put a dot and locate yourself within two or three yards on the aerial photos. I mean, we were really prepared that way. When we moved aboard the ships, they took away all those nameless maps and gave us the real maps with all the names and the coordinates and things like that. And so we got to about three or four days, still had the sand tables, but now they had maps, still had the aerial photos, but now they had names and that type thing. The preparation was very good. The preparation was so good that when we landed one mile from where we were supposed to, one of my sergeants said, you know where we are, Captain? And I said, sure. The only place there's a wooden seawall is at Les Moulins. So we're at Les Moulins. And it turned out that's where we were, one mile exactly from the Vierville exit. Tell me about being on board the ship and getting ready to get into the Higgins boats. Well, the ship was a wonderful ship. The British officers became personal friends and they were the ones that would run the flotillas and things like that of landing craft. The British Navy has a bar that opens at about five o'clock in the afternoon, which meant that we had all the liquor we wanted because the British officers had all the liquor they wanted. I don't know about the enlisted men getting grog still, but I think they still get grog. And so our rangers did fairly well in all respects. And most people ask, what about fear? And I would say that with very few exceptions, we did have one officer that turned to jelly, but the non-coms took care of that. They hauled him by his armpits until he got his battle legs under him and he became a very good commander after that. But the initial shock of all that, all those machine gun bullets and rifle bullets and artillery and mortar coming in on us, he sort of had problems. But as I say, trust the non-coms to straighten the junior officers out. There wasn't enough time to sleep. And so I just went over my equipment, made sure I had everything, made sure everything was working. And suddenly we heard, attention U.S. Rangers, attention U.S. Rangers. I'm trying to get the exact words, but it meant man the boats. And so we went up on the deck and all of our assault boats, being British, were hoisted by davits up to the loading decks. So we just climbed into the boat while it was there on the deck and they lowered us with the davits into the waters. Now we did crash into the side of the boat and things like that and the tackle got jammed. And fortunately, the British had the necessary tools and ax and they cut enough of the lowering ropes that we were lowered into the water, really without incident. We then proceeded on our mission, which was to go to La Pointe d'Auc and land there. After the 2nd Ranger Battalion, they had three companies assaulting those cliffs. And after they had successfully reached the top, they were to send a message to us and then we would go in with six, actually eight companies of Rangers and we would exploit the Pointe d'Auc capture and then go out and set up blocking positions so the Germans could not get any infantry in to support the German defenses of the beaches. The 2nd Battalion never showed up. They were sent to the wrong point by their guide boat and as a result, they were a half hour late. But we had to leave at the end of half an hour. We weren't allowed to wait over in case they were late. So we had left. They did land. First man up the cliffs was up in something like 51 seconds. He cheated. There was a bomb crater on the edge of the cliffs and sort of a hemisphere of bomb crater there. There was debris that fell out on the bottom, maybe 30 feet of it. So he ran up the 30 feet of debris. He was a marvelous athlete. He climbed up some 30 feet and was in the bottom of a bomb crater, had a rope with him, threw the rope out and all of a sudden he was building up members of his squad, that type thing. Other people had more difficult times using rope ladders, using metal ladders, using toggle rope climbs and all sorts of things like that. But the 2nd Battalion got up on top of the cliffs and radioed their message. We're there, but we were already practically at Deerview. We passed landing control, which are boats about a thousand yards offshore that tell you any events you need to know about. And they said, do not attempt to land at Deerview. The casualties are 95 percent. Half of them killed. Land on Dog White Beach. So we shifted over to Dog White Beach and we landed our first wave there. Two companies of the 2nd Battalion plus a headquarters boat. And they were cut like everybody else on Omaha Beach. They were cut down to about 50 percent. All the officers killed or wounded. And my battalion commander was watching a thousand yards out, but the waves were about a thousand yards. And he said, they quote, I'm not going to lose my battalion on that beach. So he talked the British flotilla commander into going farther east. And the commander was not at all averse to it. He did coordinate with the higher people up and they all agreed. So we moved a mile more and suddenly we found a beach with breakwaters. Well, the breakwaters come up to the seawall. They're the height of the seawall, about four or five feet. But they formed little barriers, made us like we were in forts on three sides and water on the other. And as a result, when we went in there, we took five casualties. Other people were taking 50 percent casualties. So we got our whole battalion landing intact, which, by the way, is the name of my book. But in any event, we landed and we took very few casualties on the beach, but only because of the breakwaters. Now, above us, who should be shooting at us, the hills were afire, and I mean active grass fires. So the Germans couldn't see us through the flames and smoke and they couldn't shoot at us. There was a nose on the hill to our left and nobody down there from the left could shoot at us because all they saw when they looked to the where we should have been, all they could see was water. The only place we were getting shot at was from down the beach to our right and it was 30 or 40 machine guns plus probably two 300 infantrymen plus mortars and things like that, which was enough. The artillery that everybody feared was located at Vierville and the artillery was shooting at the boats and the ships as they came in. So once you got off the boats and on the beach, all you had to contend with was small arms fire. Well, we had these breakwaters in between us and the small arms fire. So we got off the beach within 15-20 minutes and went up the bluffs and the Germans, at least half of them, because of the flames of the grass fire, at least half of them had deserted their positions and left their explosives there in the foxholes. And so we got up the hills with relatively little resistance. When I say relatively, I mean relatively because there were some people killed on the way up, but nothing like people were losing on the beach who weren't protected by these seawalls and breakwaters actually. So we got up there into the bocage and we were very lucky there again. Harvest had not taken place, so the fields were filled with mostly grassy crops that were three to six feet tall. And if you got caught by a machine gun or by ambush in there, all you had to do was to drop down. They couldn't see you. They had no idea where you were. They knew what the range was. You just rolled over a few times and then crawled to the nearest hedgerow, maybe went over, came in behind the resistance. And we had very little problems initially with hedgerows. Later, when they got vehicles up, the tanks could not penetrate the hedgerows and the tanks will not venture forward without infantry. So they had a lot of problems later with the hedgerows, but it was mostly the tanks and the vehicles that had the problems. But the early on infantry, those grasses were just worth their weight in gold because they could not see you and un-aimed rifle fire doesn't hit anything. So it was good. Let me follow up on a couple of the things. When you found out as you approached a thousand yards out from the beach, was that your first indication about just how intense the casualties were at different parts along the beach? We didn't know until we hit that first landing control that it was murder on the beach, and it was. And a company of the 116th Infantry from the Blue and Gray Division, the 29th, they did suffer 98% casualties of whom half were killed and half were just wounded. Only eight men in an entire infantry company escaped unwounded. And those eight men do not a company make, believe me. So we learned the conditions there. When we made our landing at the boundary between Dog Green and Dog White, there were two companies of the 2nd Battalion. One company, B Company, landed on Dog White and A Company landed on, well, I have them backwards. B Company landed on Dog Green, the edge of it, and the other company landed on Dog White. So they had different results. The company that landed on Dog Green lost their boat. One of the boats was sunk about 200 yards out. So they struggled through the surf to get ashore, all the time exposed to machine guns on the ridge. The other platoon managed to escape all that and came through in pretty good shape. The two companies and the headquarters boat landed on Dog White, and they were met immediately with 50% casualties, of whom 10% at least were killed. So they had a rough time, and that's when we diverted one mile, and it's almost to the inch, one mile to find the breakwaters, and we came in on the breakwaters. Now you're blessed in a couple of ways. You got rerouted to a less intense spot. You mentioned the smoke on the bluff. Also, as you've said, you came in about 7.50 a.m., I believe you said. 7.50. My foot hit the water at 7.50. And at that point, the difference between the tides then and when the first wave had gone in was quite different, correct? Absolutely. There was approximately 50 yards of beach when I landed. When the original troops had landed, there were 250 yards of beach, and they had to walk that beach through the obstacles with the artillery and small arms fire, dogging them all the way, and frankly, there weren't very, very few heroes in those early units that landed. They just got chewed up badly. And when they got to the beach, the bomb craters weren't there. The Air Force didn't release their bombs until a mile later, and it was a mess. And the 1st Division and the 29th Division both took it on the chin. Terrible losses. One of the challenges for you is to cut through the wire. What weapons did you use to do that? The wire was on the far side of the coastal road, and when I say coastal road, it was nothing but beach bungalows. It was mechanized, but it wasn't wide enough for vehicles to pass each other without running off the mechanized road. On the other side of that road, there was the equivalent of a double-apron fence, barbed wire fence. And it was not only double-apron, but it was two double-aprons, one double-apron fence and then another, about 30 feet of barbed wire. What we did was we inserted Bangalore torpedoes, which are about six feet long, but you can screw them together. So now you've got 12 feet, you can screw them together. Now you've got 18 feet and so on. So when the Grenadiers went forward, they had already gotten themselves about 20 feet. And with help, the people on the beach helped move the Bangalores forward. And then the Bangalore torpedo men themselves took the last Bangalore torpedo, ran it across the road under the wire. Having gotten it to the wire, they pulled the fuse lighters, which gave them three seconds, and they took three seconds to run back across the road. And in the process, we didn't lose a single torpedo man. In the hole that I went through, there were two Bangalore torpedo men who went in 10 feet apart, and they really blew us a big hole. It was like a 20-foot hole to go through. But there were little strands of wire still there under your feet, and some of them had loops and your feet caught in them. You had to be very careful going through the blown area. But you got through, nobody became casualties or anything like that, because it was almost impossible for anything on the bluffs down here to shoot at the foot of the bluffs here. And the bluffs were close to 100 yards from the beach, so I mean it was impossible. So we got through pretty easily and started up the bluffs, and we took a lot of casualties in the hedgerows and things like that. Now you mentioned the seawall earlier and how, you know, you're really on the beach about 15 or 20 minutes before you made your way up the bluff, but you had an interesting encounter while you were still on the beach with an old friend. Oh yeah, well he wasn't my old friend, but I knew his kids from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He was Brigadier General Coda. He was a Daniel Coda too, but everybody called him Dutch. And Dutch Coda, well, we were sitting there in our little fort waiting for orders from battalion. Sullivan, the deputy, he said, you stay here and I'll go down and get the orders. So he went down, got the orders, and he was back in two or three minutes. But during that time, my rangers were very curious men. They couldn't look at anything without wondering what it is, what does it do. And they said, hey Cap, and I said, what do you want? They said, who's that guy down there on the beach? And I looked down the beach and here was a little old fat man. He was just at the very far edge of the beach. I mean, where the dunes began. And I said, I don't know. He's either a crazy reporter who doesn't know what he's doing, or he's a high ranking officer who does know what he's doing. Because he was gesticulating to the troops and waving at them and shaking his fist. He had a cigar in his mouth, which occasionally, it was not lit, which occasionally he would wave and things like that. And as he moved, the 29th Division troops who were caught on the beach moved up to the dunes and on the dunes and started up the plateau and up the bluff spinement. And it took him about two minutes and he finally got to my position. He went down to the end of the retard, the breakwater. And I said, I better get down there and find out which do I follow. Plan A, tackle him and turn him over to the medics or Plan B, salute him and report. Well, he came around the end of the breakwaters. And I looked and there was a little tiny silver star on his collar. And I said, whoops, Plan B. So I went up to him and people criticized me for it. I did a snappy hand salute, which he returned. And I said, Sir, Captain Ron, 5th Ranger Infantry Battalion. We've just landed on this beach. Actually, I told him the situation a little bit later. And he looked at me, he said, Ron? And I said, yes, General Ron. And he said, you're not Jack Ronson, are you? And I said, yes, I am Jack Ronson. He said, well, welcome to Omaha Beach. But in any event, he then, after I gave him the situation, how we had landed and what troops there were, what the enemy resistance was, he asked me to go to, where's your battalion commander? And I could actually point him out. He was not more than 75 yards away. And I said, I'll take you. And he said, you will not. You'll stay with your men. They need you more than I do. But he didn't say that, but that was what it meant. And so I stayed with the troops and he walked his way down. But as he was leaving, he turned to my troops and said, you men are Rangers. I know you won't let me down. He wasn't encouraging us to move out. He knew we would. So he expected things of us. And as he went that 75 yards over to Colonel Schneider, he would stop with every group and he could see the gold or rather the orange diamonds on our helmets. He could see the Ranger patches. And he said the same thing, but it finally morphed into, by the time he said it the last time, it was Rangers lead the way. And that's where we got our motto. And it was all Rangers got their motto from, that Rangers lead the way, which the first time I heard it was, you men are Rangers. I know you won't let me down. But he changed the complex of the Norman invasion. The orders that we already had were to proceed by platoon infiltration to the assembly points up on the land. And they were two, three, four miles away. But what General Cota did was he said to Schneider, get your companies together and fight your way to the assembly points because you're going to operate as a battalion now. And that was the way it went. And what were your orders from there? Well, our orders were to get to the assembly area and, which we never did, and await further orders. When we got into Vierville itself, we tried to encircle Vierville on the south. Too many machine guns. Every field had three or four machine guns. So we drew back, and this was the initiative of the B Company commander. He said, I'm not going to get through that way. My job is to get to Vierville. And the assembly area was on the other side. So he went straight down the coastal road, fought his way into Vierville, and at that point we got orders, you will not try to attempt to relieve the second rangers. You will protect the beachhead. So we redeployed the whole battalion around the boundaries of Vierville to make sure the beachhead held.