Themiddle-aged physician seemed an unlikely participant for one of D-Day’s mostdaring missions. At forty years-old, he was almost double the age of hispatients in the 2nd Ranger Battalion. Capt. Walter Block was aformer Chicago pediatrician with an audacious disposition. When the warcommenced, he yearned for an adventurous career in the airborne. His wife,Alice, would have none of it. Instead, Block opted to join the rangers, “whohad something to do with trees,” he assured her. His clever rhetorical dupewould yield life-altering consequences for many.[i]
As one of the few medical personnel involvedin the Allied assault on the imposing cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, the square-jaweddoctor’s task was a formidable one. For nearly three days, the physician dodgedconcentrated enemy fire while leaping from trench to trench in his efforts toevacuate wounded. According to theChicagoTribune, Block then oversaw the evacuation of dozens of maimed combatantsfrom the 100-foot cliff to landing craft. The battle was “an inferno frombeginning to end,” commented Block. “During that time our men were scramblingup the ropes and meeting Jerry hand to hand.”
Climbing over the tedious precipice, Blockdiscovered all was in shambles.“Those --- ---- Germans did nothing butcounterattack,” he recalled. “One attack right after another was repulsed. Itkept up all day, and my back was plenty tired from crouching and running fromone shell hole to another, rendering medical aid.”
“It was almost like Custer’s Last Stand,” hecontinued. “Food low, water low, ammunition very low, and fewer men. Our menbegan to use German weapons and I proceeded to put Heinie prisoners to work asstretcher bearers.” A captured bunker atop the Pointe served as an overcrowdedbattalion command post, an ammunition storehouse, a morgue, and Block’smakeshift field hospital illuminated by candlelight. Occupants heard thecrackle of ricochets off the concrete. One of Doc’s medics recalled, “At timesthere were so many patients, the men had to lie in the command post until maybeone of the other patients would die or be patched up well enough to go backout, maybe to fight.”
In the brief interludes between attacks,Block disbursed stimulant pills to maintain the vigilance of the besiegedrangers. “Aconstant watch was kept to insure that no sleeping man snored and gave theirpositions away,” reported one observer.Few of them were more fatigued thanBlock himself. Toiling in the blackness of the bunker and the treachery of thetrenches, the doctor performed something of a medical miracle—a series ofbenevolent deeds that earned him a Silver Star.[ii]
The cliffside fortification (frequently andincorrectly referred to as “Pointe du Hoe” in period accounts) was thought anear-impregnable objective with doomful prospects. Accented by a jaggedpeninsula between Utah and Omaha Beaches and spanning only a few hundred yards,the landmark brimmed with a lethal miscellany of pillboxes, trenches, machineguns, and booby traps. Intelligence indicated the presence of six 155-mm gunswith the capacity to hammer landing zones miles away.
In the press, the saga of Pointe du Hocinitially appeared as little more than a sideshow of the big show. The actionsof a few hundred men initially seemed trivial in numerical contrast to thesweeping episodes of Omaha Beach. A small blurb on page three of the June 10edition ofStars and Stripessummarized the incident in surprisingly concise terms. Part of theninety-five-word piece read, the “rugged Rangers stormed ashore, batteredtheir way up sharp cliffs, and had captured the battery 15 minutes later. TheGermans attempted to recover their strategic battery, but all thrusts wererepelled by the Rangers.” A more compelling story soon emerged, illustratingthe broader strategic importance of the seaside promontory.[iii]
Harold “The Duke” Slater, a handsome andambitious captain of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, demanded exactness ofhis men assigned to the silencing of the guns: “I want each one of you tobecome so thoroughly familiar with Pointe du Hoe, so completely at home withit, that you could find your way from one gun position to another blindfolded.”The troops mentally visualized their maps and charts as they churned toward theFrench coast on June 6. “The long prelude was finished,” one recalled. Thefourteen months of training were over.
Ranger Alfred Baer of Memphis laterspeculated as to why the initial assault garnered relatively little presscoverage. “What actually took place on that small portion of the CherbourgPeninsula can never adequately be told. At best, it can merely be hinted at,and can never be completely understood by anyone who was not himself present onthe Pointe that bloody morning.” Because ranger training was so specialized andthe mission was small in scope, few correspondents were present. For Baer andcomrades, their gutsy attack was a durable thread of a larger fabric. Theirbond would carry them through even bloodier battles to come.[iv]
Invasion day began with “the biggest Fourthof July you ever saw, magnified a thousand times,” stated one astonishedranger. The dim morning sky was illuminated with every color of the rainbow bya deadly assortment of shells, rockets, and flares. The battalion’sBritish-operated landing craft veered significantly off course until rangercommander James Rudder ordered readjustment. The 225 rangers were over an hourlate striking their objective. The delay, combined with communicationdifficulties, compelled reinforcements to Omaha Beach instead—forsaking Rudder’s unit towage a headlong attack largely on its own. Vomit and saltwater puddled aroundthe soldiers’ ankles. Men used helmets to bail out the tides. Steady oceansprays left the seasick combatants numbly fatigued. Three of the craft sunk.Sheldon Bare and Jack Kuhn, both from the same Pennsylvania county, foundthemselves sharing a boat that morning. Kuhn dropped his submachine gun in themurky slop. “Bare, I lost my Thompson!” Kuhn bellowed on the congested LCA.Bare calmly reached down and retrieved the weapon, stating, “Here you go,Jack.” Few other challenges of the day would be as simply resolved.[v]
“Keep your eyes on the Pointe, boys,”ordered a sergeant. “[A]nything can happen now!” The nausea of the journeydiminished as the men tensed up. They checked ammo and firmly gripped theirweapons. An incoming shell from the USSTexasgorged a massive chunk from the cliff top, raining a mountain of rock on the beachand thereby lessening the height for the rangers to scale. From 200 yards out,the stout sergeant Leonard Rubin eyed a German silhouetted atop the Pointe.“Let’s see if the sonofabitch can survive this business!” exclaimed Rubin. Thesergeant spewed a hail of bullets toward the shady figure, knocking the distantdefender to his death.
“Fire the rockets!” a comrade shouted.“Let’s go!” Six projectiles hissed forth from the boats with limp lines of wetrope following the forward arc. The rounds were tipped with grappling hooks tolodge into the Pointe’s crest. Bogged down with water, half the grapples fellshort of their targets. Large ladders donated by London firemen were alsoemployed. Sgt. Len Lomell pushed through waist-deep water and up the beach’s stonycenter. Desperation forced him to think and act promptly. The ropes and firemenladders alone were not ushering rangers up the slopes promptly enough.
“Topside the cliff,” recalled Baer, “theever-increasing bark of rifles and machine guns tells its story to the menbelow. The rope is too slow.” Germans frantically slashed lines, harshlydropping rangers back to the gravelly beach. Some desperate GIs attempted toscale the rocks with knives as climbing picks. Lomell ordered four-footsections of steel ladders rushed up and assembled. “The Germans on top rolledhand grenades down the slopes, they tried to cut toggle lines, they threweverything they had at those men coming at them—but they didn’t stopthem,”Stars and Stripes laterreported. “In little groups of twos and threes they scrambled over the top andwent to work.” The frantic situation presented few viable alternatives.[vi]
Twenty-four year-old Frederick Dix, a small,black-haired staff sergeant from Syracuse, was embroiled in the fatal feud. Dixlater conveyed the rangers’ exploits to correspondent Hal Boyle. “We spent 11weeks practicing that maneuver and it caught the Germans flatfooted, becausethey didn’t think we’d dare come ashore,” noted the sergeant. “We ran intorifle, machine gun, and sniper fire from the flanks as soon as we got withinrange and lost some of our medics right there on the beach. Some of them triedto plant a Red Cross flag where they were working over the casualties but asniper put three bullet holes in it before they could raise it.” The Germanswere not all that brave, insisted Dix. Many of them “ran like hell,” and forgood reason.[vii]
The crown of the Pointe resembled the pockeddreariness of battlefronts from the Great War. Once more, Yanks climbed “over thetop” as they ascended the cliff’s precarious edge and into the labyrinth ofsmoking craters and splintered gun emplacements. “To any of the Germans dug inon Pointe du Hoe,” wrote Baer, “there could have been no plan of attackapparent from the actions of the enemy swarming up over the top of the cliffs.”Despite the German’s frenzied consternation, fierce duels were inescapable.Livid exchanges of Mk 2 and potato masher grenades scarred man and nature alikeas the two sides plunged into each other with intimate animosity. Small armsfire erupted from every corner, creating small mounds of brass casings undersoldiers’ sore feet. Men’s ears rang amid the echoing fury of Thompsons andSchmeissers. Sheldon Bare fell victim to the violence when a sniper’s bulletpunched through his right shoulder. He screamed a flood of obscenities as hefloundered backward into a crater. Unlike scores of his comrades, thePennsylvanian survived the melee. The bitter competition swept the Germansinland, although radio failure prevented Rudder from announcing the attack’soutcome.[viii]
Lieutenant Commander Knapper and Chief Yeoman Cook, of USSTexas (BB-35), examine a damaged German pillbox at Pointe du Hoc on D-Day, 6 June 1944. Earlier in the day Texas had bombarded the point in support of the Omaha Beach landings. The body of a dead U.S. Army Ranger, killed during the assault on Pointe du Hoc, lies covered up at right. Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives.
But was the feat a success? The rangers werepuzzled to discover empty gun mounts and painted telephone poles where the155-mm guns were supposedly installed. With the blessing of their lieutenant,Len Lomell and thirteen others set forth to locate and decommission theirpresumably relocated objective. Hunkered along a roadway heading into thecountryside, the squad moved swiftly and softly through the thick growth.Following enemy tire tracks, Lomell and Jack Kuhn together inched ahead tomaintain the hunt. They eventually discovered five of the six artillery piecescamouflaged a few hundred yards from the road. There, an entire company ofGermans stood idle, half-undressed and inexplicably leaving the formidable gunsunmanned. Kuhn was astonished by the artillerists’ lackadaisical response tothe sounds of nearby combat.
Undeterred by the number and proximity ofthe enemy, the two American sergeants stealthily crept forward. Under thewatchful barrel of Kuhn’s Thompson submachinegun, Lomell disabled two of thepieces with thermite grenades—muted pyrotechnics thatignited briefly intense bursts of heat. Jammed into the guns, the grenadesmelted the machinery with the effect of white hot lava. The daring GIs fellback to their squad to retrieve more explosives and then returned todecommission the remaining guns. Simultaneously, a fellow ranger loudlydetonated a nearby ammunition cache with a Bangalore torpedo. The dual featswere executed under the noses of 100 or more Germans, perhaps saving untoldlives on the neighboring beachheads.[ix]
According to Dix, many Germans wereconcealed in a lengthy tunnel connecting their defenses to the ammo dump. “Wemade a hell of a noise and scared one seventeen-year-old German,” Dix declared.“He was a senior noncom. His outfit, too, was running out of his pillbox togive up.” Before the soldier could dash to the Americans, his own captain senta slug through the deserter’s neck, killing him instantly. Dix and company thereaftercaptured the officer and angrily forced him to open a barn-turned-pillbox.
“You can’t trust those guys, you know,” Dixbickered. “One [German] stood up and waved a white flag and yelled ‘kamerad.’One of our boys said ‘Let’s give him a chance,’ and stood up and hollered,‘Come over here.’” The shouting revealed the Americans’ position and MG-42rounds soon shredded the surrounding leaves into green confetti. The GI whomade the charitable overtures to the enemy was cut down. “He was a nice guy, too,”Dix admitted. “You can’t trust those Germans. They put mortars and artillery inon us then, and wounded eight more of our men. What a hell of a trick to play.”[x]
Despite the herculean achievement ofscaling the Pointe and dismembering its neighboring guns, the rangers had yetto face their most grueling obstacle: counterattacks. Undermanned,undersupplied, inadvertently neglected with their backs to the sea, theAmericans dug in for a desperate defense. For fifty-eight contentious hours therangers fiercely guarded their triangular perimeter against seeminglyinsurmountable odds. “Sometimesthey were pinned down in the point itself with the sea on three sides and theGermans to the front,” wrote G. K. Hodenfield. “They were low on water andfood. Their ammunition was rationed. Their only weapons were rifles and twomortars. At night they crouched in their foxholes and peered into the night,waiting for the attack they knew was coming.” A private asked Col. Rudder whatthey should do. The commander replied, “Build up your lifelines and we willhold this point.” And thus they did.
The lines of battle precariously ebbed withevery German rush. The enemy congregated in massive waves and screamed witheach advance to intimidate the rangers. The GIs patiently awaited the approach,taking careful aim to conserve every round of precious ammunition. Inmethodical fashion, the defenders blunted enemy rebuttals with skilledmarksmanship and grim determination. Sgt. Eugene Elder, a six-foot mortar manfrom Missouri, knocked out a dozen German machine guns with his 60-mm. “I neversaw such shooting,” a comrade marveled. When Elder expended all his rounds, hefired colored flares at the enemy out of pure spite. “These really scared thehell of the Germans,” Dix commented. “They were perfectly harmless, but theymake a hell of a flare and sparks.”
After each relentless counterattack, therangers resumed their original placements and vigilantly maintained the line.Wishing to continue the fight alongside their pals, many of the wounded refusedevacuation. They actively scavenged for ammo and appropriated the many Mauserslittering the ground. The company welcomed much-needed artillery support by theNavy circling offshore, which took its cues from the American command postabove. “Whenever the Germans tried to concentrate any sizable body of men, adestroyer opened up and chased them away,” wrote Hodenfield. “And as they lefttheir position the rangers cut them down with rifle fire.”
By morning of the third day, reinforcementsdoggedly pushed their way to Pointe du Hoc and swept remaining resistance fromthe immediate vicinity. The ragged American defenders joked that they were thelucky survivors of their own “Little Bataan.” Unlike their less fortunatePacific counterparts in 1942, deliverance was at hand.
“I never saw anybody more welcome,” Dix saidof reinforcements. The moment of victory was bittersweet for the New Yorker.“Out of my own group, 65 men, we had lost six killed and 17 wounded and we werethe lightest hit outfit in the battle,” he remarked. “But it was worth it. Weheld that point for them and the boys we have got left are willing to takeanother any time our side wants it.” Regardless of casualty figures, nobodycould strip the men of their achievement. One concluded, “Our job was to take andhold that neck of land and we did it and are damn proud we did it.”[xi]
U. S. Army Rangers show off the ladders they used to storm the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, which they assaulted in support of Omaha Beach landings on D-Day. Photograph was released for publication on 12 June 1944. Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives.
[i]O’Donnell, 25.[ii]“Saves 50 Amid Hail Of Fire In D-Day Hell,”ChicagoTribune, August 30, 1944, p. 7; G. K. Hodenfield, “How Rangers, Cut Off,Held On Grimly in Own ‘Little Bataan,’Starsand Stripes, June 12, 1944, p. 4; O’Donnell, 106.
[iii]“Battle Sidelights,”Stars and Stripes,June 10, 1944, p. 3.
[iv]Baer, 30. Alfred Baer, a member of the 2nd Ranger Battalion’s DCompany, offers a concise yet lively account of the Pointe du Hoc assault inthis rare album compiled for his fellow veterans of the unit.
[v]Baer, 32; O’Donnell, 67; Ryan, 211.
[vi]Beevor, 102; Baer, 34-35; G. K. Hodenfield, “How Rangers, Cut Off, Held OnGrimly in Own ‘Little Bataan,’”Stars and Stripes,June 12, 1944, p. 4.
[vii]Harold V. Boyle, “Rangers, When Ammunition Gone, Use Enemy’s Weapons,”Waterloo Daily Courier, June 11, 1944,p. 6.
[viii]Baer, 35-36; O’Donnell, 74-75.
[ix]Baer, 36; O’Donnell, 86-88.
[x]Harold V. Boyle, “Rangers, When Ammunition Gone, Use Enemy’s Weapons,”Waterloo Daily Courier, June 11, 1944,p. 6.
[xi]G. K. Hodenfield, “How Rangers, Cut Off, Held On Grimly in Own ‘Little Bataan,’Stars and Stripes, June 12, 1944, p.4; Harold V. Boyle, “Rangers, When Ammunition Gone, Use Enemy’s Weapons,”Waterloo Daily Courier, June 11, 1944,p. 6. 
