A Company, 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment (United States)

A Company, 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment
116th Distinctive Unit Insignia 29th Division Shoulder Sleeve Insignia
Country	United States
Branch	National Guard of the United States

A Company, or Company A, or Able Company, of the 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment, of the 29th Infantry Division, was one of the Companies of the first wave on Omaha Beach on D-Day, 6 June 1944.

Formation and history

The plan for the landing was for the men from each boat to exit them in three filed lines. The center line would go forward first while the file on the right would peel off to the right and the left file to the left.

6 June 1944

Around 0230 - Loading into the LCAs

At around 2:30 in the morning, twelve miles out from the sea, the men of Company A began loading into their boats. The boats that were chosen for the operation were British LCAs which were going to be driven by British crewmembers. The first men of A Company that would go in on the first wave were six of the LCAs which would contain the main body of the company. These men were loaded onto their LCAs while they were still hooked up onto the ship. The seventh LCA, containing Company Headquarters, was to go in the second wave with B Company. It included Lieutenant Elisha Nance, who was the senior officer on the boat, as well as Cecil Breeden, John Reynolds, and John Clifton, the latter two of which were Bedford Boys themselves, in total there were seventeen to eighteen Company A men on the boat. The seventh boat would have been already lowered down in the water and so the members would have had to go down on the rope. Per divisional orders, in each boat for Company A an officer was supposed to jump out first .

Around 0300

At around 0300 the boats of Company A were circling around waiting to go twelve miles from the beach until the sun illuminated the area enough.

Around possibly 0500 - The beginning of the journey to the beach

It was around possibly 0500 that the sun illuminated the scene around the Company A boats (as well as probably the B Company boats) and the LCAs began their journey to the beach.

5000 yards from the beach

An aerial photograph taken of the Vierville draw, most likely how the men of A Company would have come in and seen it. On the left of the draw can be seen the barrier/shingle/concrete slope. On the left side of the draw can be seen a building, which would have secretly held a German gun emplacement, then in the middle can be seen multiple buildings within the draw, then finally on the far right is another building. Another thing that can be seen are the obstacles in the water that were mentioned to only exist in the water, and not on the beach itself when the Company landed

Another image, this time a birds-eye view, showing the Vierville draw, taken 6 June. The same buildings and barrier can be seen in the same positions as in the previous photograph

Before or around 5000 yards from the beach, the men of A Company could see and passed the DD Tanks with their floatation canvases as well as the engineers who weren't able to get their equipment in because the water was so rough. As such, it seemed to the men, or at least some of the men, that they were going to be the ones to go in first. The men in the boats began to quiet down, thinking to themselves whether they're going to make it or not, how many will die, etc, and anticipating what is about to come.

At around 5000 yards (4572m) out from the beach, the men of Company A could see from their LCAs some boats mounted with rockets that were launching rockets toward the beach. However they could see that the rockets only managed to hit the water 1000 yd (914.4m) in to the right front of them (which would have been 4000 yd (3657.6m) from the beach).

When one of the company assault boats was 1000 yards out (914.4m), it sank from having too much water on board. As it did, one drowned (James Merritt Padley) and the others had been picked up by naval craft. When the other craft came in 800 to 700 yards (731.52 to 640m) from the beach mortars fire and artillery shells began to land among the company's boats. Between 800 and 50 yards (45.7m) the German shells didn't manage to hit any of the boats, however as they came to 50 yards away from hitting the beach, one of them, which included Lieutenant Edward M. Gearing, and the flamethrower operator Russell Pickett, was struck by an artillery shell to the right of the boat, causing the right side of the boat to cave in, to which Pickett was knocked out unconscious and two men were fatally hit, while the rest of the men in the boat took the water.

Company A's men began to look from the sides of their boat at the shore they were to storm, and recognized that they had come right into the landing point that they were designated to land at. However, they saw a beach that had not been hit by any artillery or bombs that were supposed to be dropped there, as well as missing shingles or any other kind of cover.

0636 - The first ramps drop and the massacre begins

At 0636 the first ramps of the four remaining assault boats dropped above water that was waist-deep to higher than the head of the men. The moment that the ramps dropped the German automatic machine gun fire coming from both ends of the beach, began crossing accurately into the boats in great volume.

0636 to 0646

The first men on the boats tried to do what they were planned to do, exit the boats in three files, center first, and the side files peeling off. However when they tried, they collapsed as they were springing out forward into the water. Lieutenant Elijah R. Nance was hit in the heel, and was hit in the body as he reached the sand. Lieutenant Tidrick was shot it the throat as he jumped from his boat's ramp into the water. After the men trying to spring out of the boats into the water, order within the company was lost. The situation had deteriorated into an all-out personal struggle for survival. A few having tried to follow the procedure were now under water with it above their heads. They struggled around the boats with their equipment while trying to keep afloat. In one of the boats a third of the men had begun this struggle to save themselves from drowning quickly.

Some tried to drop their arms and even helmets to save themselves from drowning.

Some of the men were wounded by being hit in the water. Some others couldn't save themselves from the aforementioned struggle, and so drowned. Some of the wounded dragged themselves to the dry sand, began to quietly lay themselves upon it, and gave themselves quick shots of Morphine. Unfortunately they were drowned by the tide which was able to catch up to them.

The other men were able to reach the sand without being shot.

Lieutenant Tidrick, after being shot in the throat, made his way to the sands and flopped down 15 feet (4.6m) from Private first class Leo J. Nash. He then rose up to give an order to Nash. Nash could see Lt Tidrick bleeding from his throat and order Nash:

Advance with the wire cutters!

The order was futile, as Nash didn't have any wire cutters and in giving the order, Tidrick made himself a target for the Germans, and within an instant, Nash witnessed as German mg bullets cleave him from head to pelvis.

The Germans ahead were now firing straight down into the group of men.

All the sergeants were either killed or wounded. It seemed to the other men that German snipers were specifically spotting their officers to shoot and kill them.

The men who got to the sand quickly realized that they couldn't stay there, otherwise they'd be shot. So they decided to go back into the water to use it as cover with only their heads sticking up. Other men who had survived began seeking the obstacles underwater, and in doing so many of them were shot.

The men who survived kept moving towards the shore along the tide coming in, and in doing so finally made their landing. Other men who had reached the sand tried to burrow in it, and remained in their holes until the tide came in and drowned.

The company commander, Captain Taylor N Fellers, along with Lieutenant Benjamin R. Kearfott and the thirty men in LCA 1015, were all found with most of their bodies along the beach. No one knew what happened to them.

Those men who were moving towards the shore along the tide coming were still doing so when B Company came in behind them. By the time B Company came in, to the men of A Company, it seemed that there was only one third of them and their comrades left.

A medical boat team came in to the right of Tidrick's boat, to which then all the men of the medical boat team section were machine-gunned down, and their bodies floated with the tide.

0645 - Company Headquarters boat and B Company comes in

At 0645, nineteen minutes after the first six boats came in, Lieutenant Nance's boat number seven, the company headquarters boat, along with the boats of B Company came in at their scheduled time of nineteen minutes after H-Hour. The British coxswain of boat number seven tried to pull the lever to release the ramp, it started to but, got stuck, to which Lieutenant Nance shouted to him:

Get it down!

The British coxswain yanked the lever a couple more times and Nance gave the ramp a shove, to which it finally went down, and Lieutenant Nance, as instructed, was the first one to jump out. The British coxswain then said:

Up and at 'em mates,

Nance then made two steps on the ramp, and then jumped as far as he could forward into the water. At first when he landed the water line was up to his chest, but then a wave came in crashing down and almost submerging him and now the water was up to his neck. He began wading forward up to the beach, with his soaked pack pulling him down and his rifle above his head, for what seems to him to have been fifteen to twenty yards. After that he dropped on the cold sand out of breath and began to look around for anyone of A Company. He couldn't see anyone, no one in front of him, and no one behind him. He would have thought:

Where was everybody? Where was A Company?

He felt terribly isolated and kept struggling up the beach. He didn't figure out what happened to the Company until he got into high water. Before he did so, he was shot three times. He then turned around and saw bodies strewn across the sands as well as in the shallow water so thick in the amount of bodies that they were bumping against each other. He looked around and saw nobody. The men of his boat that were behind him were killed or back around the boat.

It might have been at this time that Private Pickett woke up. He woke up on the beach without his flamethrower. Someone had drug him in and tried to get him on his legs, but his legs wouldn't work. When he tried to get up his legs wouldn't work. He didn't know how he got there, and there was water hitting his feet. He had no idea why he couldn't walk, whether it was from the concussion, strain or whatnot he wasn't sure. He saw that there was a dead GI twelve feet in front of him. He thought that he possibly drug him to where he was and was shot thereafter. Unfortunately he wasn't able to recognize who the GI was. Pickett tried to pull himself from the water with his arms, but was only able to dig into the sand, and so couldn't move. All he could do therefore was lay there and watch what was going on. He was on the extreme right hand end of the Company, and had to look diagonally back to see the objective, the Vierville draw, which was around the center of the company area. They needed to make it to the draw and secure the beach to get their equipment out.

His first objective was to knock pillbox right back just off the beach and off to the right hand end out with his flamethrower. He had landed just to the left of it. However because he couldn't walk he wasn't able to achieve the objective.

He watched as some men were trying to run out of the water. There was one, whom they called "Whitey", that Russell could never remember the name of, he got up and started running, and the Germans shot him in the arm, which spun him, what Russell thought was like a top. Even so, Whitey stayed standing up and never fell, and ran again. However after a few yards more this time the Germans managed to knock him down. He got up again but was hopping up holding his leg, and was able to manage to get off the beach.Whitey sometime later came back in the company before Russell left and told him about what had happened.

Around Russell there was nobody to talk to. He hollered to some people every once in a while that passed close by but naturally they were going away from him. He kept watching as he layed there of the things going on around him. He saw one of the lieutenants that he could recognize just by his size and voice who came running down the beach with his whole forehead pulled down in front of his eyes, and so Russell couldn't see his face, it was Lieutenant Fergusson. Fergusson said:

Im blind I can't see! Somebody tell me somebody help me

He was laying around twenty-five to thirty yards, the man hollered at the lieutenant:

Lieutenant stop!

The lieutenant stopped, and then he said:

Turn square to your left

He turned. He then said:

Now run hard as you can go

He turn and ran, but couldn't get more than around thirty yards before he was cut down with the .50 cal. Russell thought that he was one of the best officers that they had, a West Point man, but had more to do with the enlisted man than any other officer of the company.

Russell couldn't see any men climbing beyond the shell bank. To Russell, this whole thing felt like hours and hours and hours. Eventually the water came in and Russell couldn't sustain himself with his type one Mae West around his chest. However he did still have his combat knife, and so decided to use it to cut off some nearby floating equipment. We would have one under each arm.

The tanks from the tank company that was supposed to come in were loaded onto floating canvases, which worked when they were training, but the roughness of the D-Day invasion waters, all sank but two, one fired no shots when he got in but the other fired two or three before he got knocked out.

The Battleship Texas and Arkansas along with another one were firing really far right over the Company. They only did the damage that they could inflict.

0646 and after 0645

Within the first seven to ten minutes of the ramps being dropped, the company had become almost completely leaderless, paralyzed, and incapable to conducting any actions. By this time, with the exception of Lt Nance, all of the company's officers that were on the beach were dead (Lieutenant Gearing was still at the boat that sank 1000 yards off-shore). By the time the men had abandonned any attempt to move forward against the Germans, their efforts were redirected to saving as many of their brothers in arms as possible, the ones they could reach at least. The men in the water pushed the wounded before them to get them to the shore. The men who had reached the beach crawled back to the water and pulled out men to the sand to save them from drowning. In many of these cases, those they were trying to save were shot out of their hands, or were shot themselves while attempting. One of the problems that made trying to save their comrades more difficult was the weight of their equipment. If the wounded weren't helped, they would drown from the weight. Those who were able-bodied who were pulling the others in to the sand were able to strip themselves of equipment in order to be able to move freely in water, and then strip the equipment and assault jackets off the wounded and leave them in the water.

A little after looking around for anyone, finally some people showed up around Nance. On the right of him was one of his runners, and on the left was his radioman Clifton, who was still carrying his radio on his back. Nance thought that he should dump it quick. Nance then shouted:

Keep moving, keep moving

Clifton then cried out to him:

I'm hit,

Ray looked at him and thought he looked good. He asked Clifton:

Can you move?

Clifton did not respond. Nance ducked and then looked back again and didn't see Clifton. Ray could see four men from the 29th Reconnaissance behind one of the steel tank obstacles. He shouted at them:

Spread out!

While he was saying that, a German mortar came in and killed three of them while severely wounding the other. Ray couldn't see a single German ahead. He fired a few rounds with his rifle towards the bluffs, but then a mortar shell exploded nearby, a piece of the mortar's shrapnel taking a chunk out of Ray's rifle just a few inches from his face. Ray could also see Lieutenant Emil Winkler of B Company to his right, and him and some other men were mown down by machine gun fire, Winkler being killed among them.

Nance might have seen at this point that none of the thirty-two men of boat number two had survived, which included Captain Bellegin, of which he thought that the demolitions on board the boat could have exploded. Therefore out of the six boats of Company A (excluding his), number 5 and 2 were lost.

He possibly also saw or maybe later found out that two boats of Company B had mislanded on Dog White sector, which was where G Company was supposed to land but didn't land there. The two boats and the men on board came in without much difficulty. Then C Company mislanded right behind them.

After almost having his face blown off by shrapnel, German tracer fire spurted towards Nance, kicking up sand, and ricocheting off the stones, stitching the hard beach with bullets. The Germans had spotted him and were trying to zero in on him. The German machine gun, which was from the bunker to the right of the Vierville draw and halfway up the bluffs, started up again aiming towards him.

Nance positioned himself so that he was facing the machine gun head on, which provided the Germans less of a target. If he got hit, then he would be quickly dead, a shot in the head. He looked again at his rifle and deemed it completely useless as wet sand had gotten in the workings of it.

Nance held his breath as the sound of the machine gun bullets increasingly got louder. His body began to shake with terror. Another burst of bullets came. He then looked to the right and saw a rifleman of Company A sprinting on his feet trying to escape the machine gun volleys. He then recognized who it was, it was John Reynolds, twenty-two years old. Reynolds then stopped, knelt down, and raised his rifle to return fire to the Germans. Before he got the chance to pull the trigger, Nance saw him fall dead.

The German bullets finally stopped firing across the beach towards Nance. It is possible the German machine gun operators found someone else running. Retreat wasn't possible for anyone on the beach, and all that could be done was to move forward. Ray began to crawl forward and was aiming for the cliff-face three hundred yards away. The bullets started to stitch the sand again heading in his direction, and all the sudden he felt like Frank Draper Jr. had wacked him in his right foot with a baseball bat. Part of his heel had been shot away. Suddenly, when Nance thought that there was no more hope left, he looked up at the sky, and although he didn't see anything, he felt like something settled over him, and got a warm feeling, as if somehow he was going to live.

Nance laid as still as he could in hoping that the German machine gunner would think that he was dead. However even dead corpses weren't safe from the machine gunners. The German machine gunner would shoot some bullets in Nance's direction, then target someone else, and then come back to Nance. To Nance it seemed like the machine gunner was playing cat and mouse with him. He then tried in vain to dig a shallow foxhole in the shingle and sands with his hands. He then spotted a tidal pool, and he thought that it looked deep enough for a man to hide from the gunners. He began crawling as fast as he could, crawling into the warm water of the pool. He then filled his lungs and ducked down. All the sudden his WWI binocular case strap was pierced by a bullet. He ducked down again and then again. Some time later on he came up for air and saw a New Yorker soldier not too far from him. Right then the machine gun bullets began coming back his way again, and so he turned to face them head on. He told the soldier from New York to do the same, and as a result, the bullets were starting to be shot somewhere else. The two then scrambled their way across the last yards towards the cliff, and were finally able to reach the shingle now beneath them. Then Nance collapsed with blood pouring from his foot. It didn't seem to matter as much, as he was now safe. He looked back out at the sea, and could recognize the bodies of two dead officers, who were on their backs facing up lying in the water. A lot of the men had been caught by the tide coming in. It had crept up behind nance, and drowned men of Company A that no longer had more strength to crawl forward. Laying on the pebbled under Vierville, he still felt responsable for every last one of them.

0656

Within the first twenty minutes of the ramps dropping, Company A had effectively ceased to be a functioning assault company and descended into a desolate little rescue party that was bent on its own survival and saving other lives. Absolutely no orders were longer being given to anyone, as there were next to no officers left. The surviving men who remained free from injury moved or didn't move based on how he saw fit. The effective leader of the rescuing work as could be seen by all the men was by first-aid man, T/5 Cecil Breeden.

0800 to 0900

Around two to three hours later, Pickett was picked up and sent back to a British ship, by that point he couldn't see anyone having gotten past the shell bank.

0816

Around one hour and forty minutes after landing, the six A Company men from the boat that landed on the far right flank, Boat N° 23 (assumingly LCA 23), which included Privates Schaefer and Lovejoy, had managed to work their way up to the edge of the cliff. Around them they saw no other man who had made it as far as they did. Schaefer and Lovejoy joined up with a group from the 2nd Ranger Battalion and fought with them throughout the rest of the day. Other than that it seemed that Company A's contribution to the assault to be mysterious and questionable.

Around 1000

An image of the Vierville draw after D-Day. The buildings shown in the previous image are clearly wiped out, probably by the bombardment by US Navy ships mentioned

The two sections of B Company that had landed at Dog White were able to get through the barbed wire and then the plateau. C Company then followed up behind and they were able to come up into the Vierville ridge by 1000. By that time the firing onto the remainder of A Company as well as B Company finally almost ceased due to the two B Company sections and C Company coming behind the Germans. Nance thought that they were the ones that saved the men on the beach with him.

Then or sometime later Reed came by Nance and was talking to a medic when he told Nance what he had seen. He explained to Nance that he had seen Feller's body, and at that moment Nance realized that he was Company Commander. He couldn't see a man with a weapon around, to Nance it was a peculiar feeling.

Afternoon

During the afternoon the remaining survivors stayed at the bottom of the cliff, which would have included Nance, the New Yorker, Whitey, among others.

Night

At night the few remaining survivors joined the rest of 1st Battalion.

It may have been at some point or a few days later that the Group Critique notes for the Company on D-Day were written by Nash, Grosser, Gearing, Murdoch, and Nance:

This is the first page of the copy of the original, presumably hand-written Group Critique.

/2-114 ① Copy2
116-A ON D DAY
These notes were prepared by GC with seven survivors of the company.
There were no disagreements over facts. The places of landing, as marked
on the overlays, were readily pointed out by the men. There was no dis-
agreement. ---HQ

When the company was still 5000 yards out, the men saw the barrage from the rocket
boats striking the water about 1000 yards to their right front. They saw nothing
hit on their beach or anywhere near it. “A” came on in 6 assault boats. As they
drew to within 700-800 yards of the beach, arty and mortar fire began to fall among
the boats. There had already been loss ; one boat foundered 1000 yards out from
shipping too much water ; one man had drowned and the others had been picked up by
naval craft. At first the enemy shell fire was ineffective but as the first boats
drew to within 50 yards of the sand, one was struck by an arty shell and two men
were mortally hit, the others taking to the water.

The men recognized that they were coming straight into the designated landing point.
They were at the sides looking toward the enemy shore. What they saw was an abso-
lutely unblemished beach, unpacked by arty or bomb fire and wholly barren of shingle
or any other cover. The first ramps were dropped at 0636 in water that was waist-
deep to over a man’s head. As if this had been the signal for which the enemy
waited, the ramps were instantly enveloped in a crossing of automatic Fire which
was accurate and in a great volume. It came at the boats from both ends of the beach.
“A” had planned to move in three files from each boat, center file going first,
then flank files peeling off to right and left. The first men tried it. They
crumpled as they sprang from the ship, forward into the water. Then order was lost.
It seemed to the men then that the only way to get ashore with a chance for safety
was to dive head-first into the water. (Pvt Howard L. Grosser) A few had jumped
off, trying to follow the SOP, and had gone down in water over their heads. They
were around the boat now, struggling with their equipment and trying to keep afloat.
In one of the boats, a third of the men had become engaged in this struggle to save
themselves from a quick drowning. (Pfc Gilbert G. Murdock) That many were lost
before they had a chance to face the enemy. Some of them were hit in the water and
wounded. Some drowned then. Others, wounded, dragged themselves ashore and upon
finding the sands, lay quiet and gave themselves shots, only to be caught and
drowned within a few minutes by the on-racing tide. (Murdock) But some men moved
safely through the bullet fire to the sands, then found that they could not hold
there; they went back into the water and used it as cover, only their heads stick-
ing out above it. Others sought the under-water obstacles. Many were
shot while so doing. Those who survived kept moving shoreward with the tide and in
this way finally made their landing. (Murdock and Pfc Leo J. Nash) They were
still in this tide-borne movement when “B” came in behind them. (Pvt Grosser)
Others who had gotten into the sands and had burrowed in, remained in their holes
until the tide caught up to them, then they, too, joined the men in the water.
(Grosser)

Within 7-10 minutes after the ramps had dropped, “A” had become inert, leaderless
and almost incapable of action. The company was entirely bereft of officers.
^Lieut ^Clyde N. Garing was back where the first boat had undered. All of the
others were dead, except Lieutenant Elijah Nance who had been hit in the heel as he left
the boat, and then in the body as he reached the sands. ^Lieut Edward Tidrick was
hit in the throat as he jumped from the ramp into the water. He went on to the
sands and flopped down 15 feet from Private Leo J. Nash (Pfc). He raised up to
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Second page of the copy

Copy
give Nash an order. Nash saw him bleeding from the throat and heard his words:
“Advance with the wire cutters !” It was futile. Nash had no wire cutters, and in
giving the order, Tidrick had made himself a target for just and instant, and Nash
saw mg bullets cleave him from head to pelvis. German machine gunners along the
cliff directly ahead were now firing straight down into the party. Captain Taylor
N. Fellers and Lieutenant Benjamin R. Kearfott had come in with 30 men from “A” aboard
LCA 1015, but what happened to that boat team in detail will never be know. Every
man was killed; most of the bodies were found along the beach.

In those fist 5-10 confused minutes when the men were fighting the water, dropping
their arms and even their helmets to save themselves from drowning, and learning by
what they saw that they landing had deteriorated into a struggle for personal sur-
vival, every sergeant was either killed or wounded. It seemed to the others that
enemy snipers had spotted their leaders and had directed their fire so as to exter-
minate them. A medical boat team came in on the right of Tidrick’s boat. The Ger-
mans machine-gunned every man in the section. (Nash) Their bodies floated with
the tide. By this time the leader-less infantrymen had foregone any attempt to get
forward against the enemy and where men moved at all, their efforts were directed
toward trying to save any of their comrades they could reach. The men in the water
pushed wounded men ahead of them so as to get them ashore. (Grosser and Murdock)
Those who had reached the sands crawled back and forth into the water, pulling men
to the land to save them from drowing, in many cases, only to have them shot out of
their hands or to be hit themselves while in these exertions. The weight of the
infantry equipment handicapped all this rescue work. If left unhelped, the
wounded drowned because of it. The able-bodied who pulled them in stripped them-
selves of equipment so that they could move more freely in the water, then cut away
the assault jackets and the equipment of the wounded, and dropped them in the water.
Grosser, Murdock and Cpl Edward M. Gurry.) Within 20 minutes of striking the
beach, “A” had ceased to be an assault company and had become a forlorn little res-
cue party bent on survival and the saving of lives. Orders were no longer being
given by anyone; each man who remained sound moved or not as he saw fit. The lead-
ing hand in the rescue work, by the account of all survivors, was a first-aid man,
T/5 Tom Breedin.

It is estimated by the men that one-third of “A” remained by the time “B” hit the
beach. One hour and 40 minutes after the landing, six men from the boat which had
landed on the far right flank (Boat N° 23) six men men from “A” had worked up to the
edge of the cliff. They saw no others from the company who had advanced as far.
(Nash) Two of the men, Pvts Shefer and Lovejoy, joined a group from the Second
Rangers, who were assaulting over the cliff to the right of “A”, and fought with
them through the day. Otherwise, “A”’s contribution to the attack appears to have
been a cipher. The few survivors stayed at the cliff bottom during the afternoon
and joined the Battalion that night.





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Bibliography

1. "A Company, 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment (United States)". WWII Archives. 10 May 2023.
2. "Elisha Ray Nance". WWII Archives. 28 May 2023.
3. "Russell LeeRoy Pickett". WWII Archives. 28 May 2023.