By JOHN C. MCMANUS
June 2014
Colonel George Taylor knew amphibious warfare. He had helped mastermind the Allied landings in North Africa, and he had led the 16th Infantry into Sicily. In that
olonel George Taylor knew amphibious warfare. He had helped mastermind the Allied landings in North Africa, and he had led the 16th Infantry into Sicily. In that time, he had developed two strong opinions about any invasion: The beach was death and inertia was the mortal enemy of success.
“In a landing operation, there are two classes of men that may be found on the beach,” he wrote several months before D-Day, “those who are already dead and those who are about to die.”
This notion was never far from his mind, almost to the point of obsession. On the beach, men were like penned animals, just waiting for the slaughter. Taylor had already seen too much death in this war and he had no wish to see any more. His troops were like family. The idea of a beach choked with their dead, shattered bodies was horrifying. Taylor was an unambiguous, rather clear-thinking man who believed that excellence came through simplicity. In the aftermath of one pre-invasion exercise back in England, Gen. Clarence Huebner, who would lead the storied 1st Infantry Division in the assault on Omaha Beach, had huddled with his commanders for a critique. One by one, they spoke glowingly of the training exercise, especially the overall plan. In stark contrast to his colleagues, Taylor, Huebner’s deputy, said that such a plan would never work. “Why not?” Huebner asked.
“Because it’s too damned complicated,” Taylor replied curtly.
He was a thinker and a doer, the sort of soldier who felt equally comfortable in a front-line foxhole or a seminar room at an Army staff college. “He was a good officer and really should have been a general by then,” Private Pete Lypka, who had served under him since Sicily, said, “but he had a habit of saying what was on his mind in as few words as possible. He was no apple-polisher.” Taylor knew that the true antidote for slaughter on Omaha beach was rapid movement, though he admitted that maneuvering against powerful defenses “was almost impossible in modern combat.”
The 45-year-old West Pointer had spent more than half his life in the Army. Shades of gray crept over his close-cropped hair now, and crow’s-feet spidered from the corners of his penetrating blue eyes, though his face retained a boyish sheen. Like many other effective combat leaders in the Army, he was diminutive in height at five feet seven, but somehow large in physical presence. An infantryman to the core, he was steeped in the commonsense world of field soldiering, both peacetime and wartime. “Beneath all the officer veneer,” Corporal Sam Fuller wrote, “Colonel Taylor had a heart of gold. I loved the guy.”
Col. George Taylor led the first wave of troops on Omaha Beach. | U.S. Army
Taylor loved the Army, though his fertile mind had generated several dozen ideas about how it could be, and should be, run much better. One idea stood above the others. Taylor believed that senior officers were too distant from soldiers, too reluctant, or perhaps unable, to teach and show their subordinates what to do, especially in combat. “What we lack, and need more of, is the worm’s eye view of leadership,” he once wrote. “No one ever tells the junior officer just exactly what he should do, and how he should do it.”
As Colonel Taylor, in charge of the very first wave of troops, approached Easy Red—the code name for a sector of coastline in the center of Omaha Beach—with the rear command post at 8:15 a.m. on June 6, 1944, he was determined to do just that. In this circumstance, he was certain that this would mean getting them to move, so this notion preoccupied his mind. He knew he would be greeted by sights of carnage, destruction, confusion and inertia. Indeed, the evening before, aboard the USS Samuel Chase, Taylor had told war correspondents Don Whitehead, Robert Capa and Jack Thompson, “The first six hours will be the toughest. This is the period during which we will be the weakest. But we’ve got to open the door.”
His words were prophetic, probably more so than even he himself appreciated. When he and his command group landed, the various inland fights were raging in full force. Much of the beach was still under intense fire from German artillery, machine-gun nests and mortars.
Taylor’s rear command post consisted of two boats, an LCM and an LCVP. Unlike many that day, the two boats landed without loss, though they were under machine-gun fire. Taylor and the others waded, under fire all the way, about 50 yards through chest-high water to the beach. “It was a helpless feeling wading while shot at,” Taylor later said. When he reached the beach, the scene that greeted his eyes was even grimmer than he had expected. Wrecked Higgins boats floated aimlessly on the crashing surf. The water was colored a muddy pink from blood; the sand was dotted and splotched with lines and circles of crimson. Body parts—everything from arms and legs to heads and fingers—littered the sand and stones. Angry-looking obstacles still honeycombed the beach, seemingly oblivious to the prodigious and costly efforts of the Gap Assault Teams to clear them. Blood-soaked bandages, discarded equipment and sand-choked rifles lay in random clusters. Dead and wounded men—some face-down, some face-up on arched backs—littered the waterline and the sands. Other figures lay huddled at the bank of shingle just above the tide line. Some looked dead. Others howled for medics. Several tanks were burning or immobilized. Mortar and artillery shells exploded—oily puffs of smoke, dust or sand floated in the wake of the explosions. Bullets snipped against the sand and stones of the beach.
Taylor emerged from the water and, in the recollection of Private Warren Rulien, a member of the intelligence and reconnaissance (“I&R”) platoon, the colonel came under accurate machine-gun fire. “He laid down on his stomach and started crawling towards shore,” Rulien said. The young private chuckled at the sight of the mighty colonel crawling ashore. He overheard Taylor say to one of his officers, “If we’re going to die, let’s die up there,” pointing at the bluffs. The colonel and the men around him got to their feet and crossed the beach. The natural tendency of nearly every person who was entering this inferno, including many in Taylor’s command group, was to gravitate toward the faux safety of the shingle. Not Taylor, though. He remained upright and strode purposefully to the left in the direction of the E-3 draw, a small valley on the beach where he and Mathews had planned to situate their command post. “It soon became evident that no such command post existed and most elements [were] pinned on the beach,” a post-battle report stated.
Taylor was not surprised. All that really mattered now, he knew, was getting his people into motion, off this beach. He was consumed by this idea; he understood what to do and he knew he must tell them in no uncertain terms. He moved west along Easy Red beach and roared at his men to get moving. As he did so, he gathered members of his headquarters into a veritable entourage, following him everywhere he went. Major Charles Tegtmeyer, his regimental surgeon, was lying against the shingle bank, wet and shivering from the landing, catching his breath and gathering his medics, when he spotted Taylor. “He passed us walking erect, followed by his staff and yelled for me to bring my group along,” the doctor recalled. Major Tegtmeyer had become seasick during the ride to shore. The rocking of the boat, combined with the stench of exhaust fumes and the sight of Captain Lawrence Deery, the regimental chaplain, munching contentedly on an apple, had caused Tegtmeyer to throw up the entire contents of his stomach. He was worried that the invasion was a complete failure and that any minute the Germans would stream down from the bluffs and overwhelm them. The idea of retreating back into the icy sea was repugnant. “I’ll be damned if I go back into that water even if Hitler himself should order me,” he exclaimed sardonically to the men around him.
The sight of Taylor galvanized the weakened physician into action. He and many of his medics stood up and followed the colonel along the beach. Under heavy fire, Tegtmeyer and the others pulled wounded men from the surf, treated their wounds and deposited them in open spots along the shingle bank. Major Tegtmeyer bound up more wounds (and probably saved more lives) than he could count; he was dismayed to find, though, that many soldiers were beyond his help. “The number of dead, killed by mines, shell fragments, machine guns and sniper bullets was appalling,” he said. The doctor was especially surprised to see that “a great percentage were dead from bullet wounds through the head,” since this was unusual in modern war. Father Deery trailed along and kept busy administering last rites or just comforting the dying. In Tegtmeyer’s estimation, “every man who moved along the beach had utter disregard for his own personal safety.”
Open In New Window
U.S. Army map of Omaha Beach
The mere act of movement was exhausting, and not just because of the enemy fire. The sand was wet and sticky. The incoming tide made that problem even worse. It was easy to stumble over the shingle bank’s fist-sized stones, as well as the bodies of the living and the dead. At one point, Tegtmeyer tripped and fell over the inert body of an engineer. Tegtmeyer was so tired he needed to rest for several minutes before he could get up and move again. To make matters worse, German Nebelwerfer rockets—“Screaming Meemies”—shrieked overhead and exploded closer to the waterline. Tegtmeyer watched with fascinated admiration as Lieutenant Colonel Robert Skaggs, commander of the 741st Tank Battalion, stood near the waterline and swung his life preserver in the air, like some sort of magic wand, to gather several of his tankers. He ordered them to get back into any abandoned tanks they found and resume firing at the Germans. Somehow Skaggs did not get hit.
Colonel Taylor, during his trek, succeeded in gathering three functional radios. The raised antennas and Colonel Taylor’s erect posture began to attract the attention of the Germans. “For Christ’s sake, Colonel,” Tegtmeyer cried, “get down, you’re drawing fire!”
Taylor grinned at the doctor, ordered the radioman to pull the antenna down and said, “There are only two kinds of men on this beach, those who are dead and those who are about to die. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Corporal Sam Fuller, a 32-year-old former newspaper reporter, novelist and Hollywood screenwriter turned combat soldier, flopped down next to Taylor. During the Sicily campaign, the two men had bonded over their mutual love of cigars. Fuller had run through a gauntlet of fire to reach Colonel Taylor, aided by the sight of a discarded cigar butt. “Even in the eye of that tornado of bullets and explosions, there was no mistaking a Havana,” Fuller wrote. “Taylor smoked them. He had to be somewhere nearby.”
Fuller had been ordered by his lieutenant to tell the colonel about the Spalding group’s success in blowing a breach in the wire and getting off the beach. “Who blew it?” Taylor asked.
“Streczyk,” Fuller replied.
“All right,” Taylor replied with a smile. He reached into a bag, removed a box of cigars and handed it to Fuller. “Enjoy ’em, Sammy. You earned them, running over here.”
Fuller barely had time to thank the colonel before Taylor stood up, amid heavy fire and shouted to everyone around them. “There are two kinds of men out here! The dead! And those who are about to die! So let’s get the hell off this beach and at least die inland.”
Taylor, seemingly oblivious to danger, now roamed Easy Red, repeating these words, or some variation of them, to practically anyone he encountered. There is no way to tell how many men saw him, heard him or were affected by his presence, but the number must have been substantial, probably in the hundreds. Jack Thompson, a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune who had parachuted into Sicily the year before, landed with Taylor’s command group and followed the colonel as much as the situation permitted. He remembered Taylor saying, “Gentlemen, we are being killed on the beach, let us go inland and get killed.” Thompson was struck by the colonel’s use of the word “gentlemen” amid such chaotic and deadly circumstances “when the world was exploding around us … to say nothing of the machine guns up on the bluff.” Captain Thomas Merendino, commander of B Company, remembered that “men surged forward” after hearing Taylor. In another spot, Private Frank Ciarpelli heard the colonel say, “It’s better to be shot to death than drown like rats on the beach.” Private First Class Harold Saylor was focusing on staying alive from one moment to the next when he noticed someone running by and screaming, “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach: the dead and those who are going to die! Now let’s get the hell out of here!” Only later did Saylor realize that it had been Colonel Taylor. Elsewhere, Private First Class Earl Chellis heard Taylor urging him and several other members of a small pinned-down group to get off the beach. “Then everybody seemed to get up and we all went,” Chellis said.
Omaha Beach days after the invasion. | U.S. Army
It is impossible to say how much impact Taylor’s actions had on salvaging a bad situation and turning the momentum of the Omaha beach battle, but they were undoubtedly a significant factor. He was the first senior officer on the 1st Division side of the beach, and his exhortations saved dozens of lives. The exit that Taylor and his men eventually cleared was the only one open during the early part of the assault—the only way for the early invaders to escape the death trap of the beach.
All told, the Allies lost 3,000 men on Omaha Beach that day. It was the bloodiest battle of the entire “Overlord” invasion, which took place across five sections of Normandy coast and which eventually gave the Allies the foothold they needed to begin their slow march through France into the heart of Hitler’s Europe. Less than a month after the invasion, Taylor was promoted to brigadier general; he ended up, in 1945, accepting the surrender by German forces in Czechoslovakia.
Even if Taylor has faded from memory—thanks to the famous D-Day film The Longest Day, his legendary quote is often wrongly attributed to Gen. Norman Cota—he was honored for his role on June 6, 1944, in his lifetime. In the citation for his Distinguished Service Cross, the Army applauded him for braving snipe and “calmly and cooly … convert[ing] a bewildered mob into a co-ordinated fighting force.” Seventy years later, it’s important to celebrate men like that.
John C. McManus is professor of U.S. military history at the Missouri University of Science and Technology and author of The Dead and Those About To Die, from which this article is adapted.
time, he had developed two strong opinions about any invasion: The beach was death and inertia was the mortal enemy of success.
“In a landing operation, there are two classes of men that may be found on the beach,” he wrote several months before D-Day, “those who are already dead and those who are about to die.”
This notion was never far from his mind, almost to the point of obsession. On the beach, men were like penned animals, just waiting for the slaughter. Taylor had already seen too much death in this war and he had no wish to see any more. His troops were like family. The idea of a beach choked with their dead, shattered bodies was horrifying. Taylor was an unambiguous, rather clear-thinking man who believed that excellence came through simplicity. In the aftermath of one pre-invasion exercise back in England, Gen. Clarence Huebner, who would lead the storied 1st Infantry Division in the assault on Omaha Beach, had huddled with his commanders for a critique. One by one, they spoke glowingly of the training exercise, especially the overall plan. In stark contrast to his colleagues, Taylor, Huebner’s deputy, said that such a plan would never work. “Why not?” Huebner asked.
“Because it’s too damned complicated,” Taylor replied curtly.
He was a thinker and a doer, the sort of soldier who felt equally comfortable in a front-line foxhole or a seminar room at an Army staff college. “He was a good officer and really should have been a general by then,” Private Pete Lypka, who had served under him since Sicily, said, “but he had a habit of saying what was on his mind in as few words as possible. He was no apple-polisher.” Taylor knew that the true antidote for slaughter on Omaha beach was rapid movement, though he admitted that maneuvering against powerful defenses “was almost impossible in modern combat.”
The 45-year-old West Pointer had spent more than half his life in the Army. Shades of gray crept over his close-cropped hair now, and crow’s-feet spidered from the corners of his penetrating blue eyes, though his face retained a boyish sheen. Like many other effective combat leaders in the Army, he was diminutive in height at five feet seven, but somehow large in physical presence. An infantryman to the core, he was steeped in the commonsense world of field soldiering, both peacetime and wartime. “Beneath all the officer veneer,” Corporal Sam Fuller wrote, “Colonel Taylor had a heart of gold. I loved the guy.”
Col. George Taylor led the first wave of troops on Omaha Beach. | U.S. Army
Taylor loved the Army, though his fertile mind had generated several dozen ideas about how it could be, and should be, run much better. One idea stood above the others. Taylor believed that senior officers were too distant from soldiers, too reluctant, or perhaps unable, to teach and show their subordinates what to do, especially in combat. “What we lack, and need more of, is the worm’s eye view of leadership,” he once wrote. “No one ever tells the junior officer just exactly what he should do, and how he should do it.”
As Colonel Taylor, in charge of the very first wave of troops, approached Easy Red—the code name for a sector of coastline in the center of Omaha Beach—with the rear command post at 8:15 a.m. on June 6, 1944, he was determined to do just that. In this circumstance, he was certain that this would mean getting them to move, so this notion preoccupied his mind. He knew he would be greeted by sights of carnage, destruction, confusion and inertia. Indeed, the evening before, aboard the USS Samuel Chase, Taylor had told war correspondents Don Whitehead, Robert Capa and Jack Thompson, “The first six hours will be the toughest. This is the period during which we will be the weakest. But we’ve got to open the door.”
His words were prophetic, probably more so than even he himself appreciated. When he and his command group landed, the various inland fights were raging in full force. Much of the beach was still under intense fire from German artillery, machine-gun nests and mortars.
Taylor’s rear command post consisted of two boats, an LCM and an LCVP. Unlike many that day, the two boats landed without loss, though they were under machine-gun fire. Taylor and the others waded, under fire all the way, about 50 yards through chest-high water to the beach. “It was a helpless feeling wading while shot at,” Taylor later said. When he reached the beach, the scene that greeted his eyes was even grimmer than he had expected. Wrecked Higgins boats floated aimlessly on the crashing surf. The water was colored a muddy pink from blood; the sand was dotted and splotched with lines and circles of crimson. Body parts—everything from arms and legs to heads and fingers—littered the sand and stones. Angry-looking obstacles still honeycombed the beach, seemingly oblivious to the prodigious and costly efforts of the Gap Assault Teams to clear them. Blood-soaked bandages, discarded equipment and sand-choked rifles lay in random clusters. Dead and wounded men—some face-down, some face-up on arched backs—littered the waterline and the sands. Other figures lay huddled at the bank of shingle just above the tide line. Some looked dead. Others howled for medics. Several tanks were burning or immobilized. Mortar and artillery shells exploded—oily puffs of smoke, dust or sand floated in the wake of the explosions. Bullets snipped against the sand and stones of the beach.
Taylor emerged from the water and, in the recollection of Private Warren Rulien, a member of the intelligence and reconnaissance (“I&R”) platoon, the colonel came under accurate machine-gun fire. “He laid down on his stomach and started crawling towards shore,” Rulien said. The young private chuckled at the sight of the mighty colonel crawling ashore. He overheard Taylor say to one of his officers, “If we’re going to die, let’s die up there,” pointing at the bluffs. The colonel and the men around him got to their feet and crossed the beach. The natural tendency of nearly every person who was entering this inferno, including many in Taylor’s command group, was to gravitate toward the faux safety of the shingle. Not Taylor, though. He remained upright and strode purposefully to the left in the direction of the E-3 draw, a small valley on the beach where he and Mathews had planned to situate their command post. “It soon became evident that no such command post existed and most elements [were] pinned on the beach,” a post-battle report stated.
Taylor was not surprised. All that really mattered now, he knew, was getting his people into motion, off this beach. He was consumed by this idea; he understood what to do and he knew he must tell them in no uncertain terms. He moved west along Easy Red beach and roared at his men to get moving. As he did so, he gathered members of his headquarters into a veritable entourage, following him everywhere he went. Major Charles Tegtmeyer, his regimental surgeon, was lying against the shingle bank, wet and shivering from the landing, catching his breath and gathering his medics, when he spotted Taylor. “He passed us walking erect, followed by his staff and yelled for me to bring my group along,” the doctor recalled. Major Tegtmeyer had become seasick during the ride to shore. The rocking of the boat, combined with the stench of exhaust fumes and the sight of Captain Lawrence Deery, the regimental chaplain, munching contentedly on an apple, had caused Tegtmeyer to throw up the entire contents of his stomach. He was worried that the invasion was a complete failure and that any minute the Germans would stream down from the bluffs and overwhelm them. The idea of retreating back into the icy sea was repugnant. “I’ll be damned if I go back into that water even if Hitler himself should order me,” he exclaimed sardonically to the men around him.
On D-Day, the mere act of moving was exhausting.
The sight of Taylor galvanized the weakened physician into action. He and many of his medics stood up and followed the colonel along the beach. Under heavy fire, Tegtmeyer and the others pulled wounded men from the surf, treated their wounds and deposited them in open spots along the shingle bank. Major Tegtmeyer bound up more wounds (and probably saved more lives) than he could count; he was dismayed to find, though, that many soldiers were beyond his help. “The number of dead, killed by mines, shell fragments, machine guns and sniper bullets was appalling,” he said. The doctor was especially surprised to see that “a great percentage were dead from bullet wounds through the head,” since this was unusual in modern war. Father Deery trailed along and kept busy administering last rites or just comforting the dying. In Tegtmeyer’s estimation, “every man who moved along the beach had utter disregard for his own personal safety.”
Open In New Window
U.S. Army map of Omaha Beach
The mere act of movement was exhausting, and not just because of the enemy fire. The sand was wet and sticky. The incoming tide made that problem even worse. It was easy to stumble over the shingle bank’s fist-sized stones, as well as the bodies of the living and the dead. At one point, Tegtmeyer tripped and fell over the inert body of an engineer. Tegtmeyer was so tired he needed to rest for several minutes before he could get up and move again. To make matters worse, German Nebelwerfer rockets—“Screaming Meemies”—shrieked overhead and exploded closer to the waterline. Tegtmeyer watched with fascinated admiration as Lieutenant Colonel Robert Skaggs, commander of the 741st Tank Battalion, stood near the waterline and swung his life preserver in the air, like some sort of magic wand, to gather several of his tankers. He ordered them to get back into any abandoned tanks they found and resume firing at the Germans. Somehow Skaggs did not get hit.
Colonel Taylor, during his trek, succeeded in gathering three functional radios. The raised antennas and Colonel Taylor’s erect posture began to attract the attention of the Germans. “For Christ’s sake, Colonel,” Tegtmeyer cried, “get down, you’re drawing fire!”
Taylor grinned at the doctor, ordered the radioman to pull the antenna down and said, “There are only two kinds of men on this beach, those who are dead and those who are about to die. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Corporal Sam Fuller, a 32-year-old former newspaper reporter, novelist and Hollywood screenwriter turned combat soldier, flopped down next to Taylor. During the Sicily campaign, the two men had bonded over their mutual love of cigars. Fuller had run through a gauntlet of fire to reach Colonel Taylor, aided by the sight of a discarded cigar butt. “Even in the eye of that tornado of bullets and explosions, there was no mistaking a Havana,” Fuller wrote. “Taylor smoked them. He had to be somewhere nearby.”
Fuller had been ordered by his lieutenant to tell the colonel about the Spalding group’s success in blowing a breach in the wire and getting off the beach. “Who blew it?” Taylor asked.
“Streczyk,” Fuller replied.
“All right,” Taylor replied with a smile. He reached into a bag, removed a box of cigars and handed it to Fuller. “Enjoy ’em, Sammy. You earned them, running over here.”
Fuller barely had time to thank the colonel before Taylor stood up, amid heavy fire and shouted to everyone around them. “There are two kinds of men out here! The dead! And those who are about to die! So let’s get the hell off this beach and at least die inland.”
Taylor, seemingly oblivious to danger, now roamed Easy Red, repeating these words, or some variation of them, to practically anyone he encountered. There is no way to tell how many men saw him, heard him or were affected by his presence, but the number must have been substantial, probably in the hundreds. Jack Thompson, a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune who had parachuted into Sicily the year before, landed with Taylor’s command group and followed the colonel as much as the situation permitted. He remembered Taylor saying, “Gentlemen, we are being killed on the beach, let us go inland and get killed.” Thompson was struck by the colonel’s use of the word “gentlemen” amid such chaotic and deadly circumstances “when the world was exploding around us … to say nothing of the machine guns up on the bluff.” Captain Thomas Merendino, commander of B Company, remembered that “men surged forward” after hearing Taylor. In another spot, Private Frank Ciarpelli heard the colonel say, “It’s better to be shot to death than drown like rats on the beach.” Private First Class Harold Saylor was focusing on staying alive from one moment to the next when he noticed someone running by and screaming, “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach: the dead and those who are going to die! Now let’s get the hell out of here!” Only later did Saylor realize that it had been Colonel Taylor. Elsewhere, Private First Class Earl Chellis heard Taylor urging him and several other members of a small pinned-down group to get off the beach. “Then everybody seemed to get up and we all went,” Chellis said.
Omaha Beach days after the invasion. | U.S. Army
It is impossible to say how much impact Taylor’s actions had on salvaging a bad situation and turning the momentum of the Omaha beach battle, but they were undoubtedly a significant factor. He was the first senior officer on the 1st Division side of the beach, and his exhortations saved dozens of lives. The exit that Taylor and his men eventually cleared was the only one open during the early part of the assault—the only way for the early invaders to escape the death trap of the beach.
All told, the Allies lost 3,000 men on Omaha Beach that day. It was the bloodiest battle of the entire “Overlord” invasion, which took place across five sections of Normandy coast and which eventually gave the Allies the foothold they needed to begin their slow march through France into the heart of Hitler’s Europe. Less than a month after the invasion, Taylor was promoted to brigadier general; he ended up, in 1945, accepting the surrender by German forces in Czechoslovakia.
Even if Taylor has faded from memory—thanks to the famous D-Day film The Longest Day, his legendary quote is often wrongly attributed to Gen. Norman Cota—he was honored for his role on June 6, 1944, in his lifetime. In the citation for his Distinguished Service Cross, the Army applauded him for braving snipe and “calmly and cooly … convert[ing] a bewildered mob into a co-ordinated fighting force.” Seventy years later, it’s important to celebrate men like that.
John C. McManus is professor of U.S. military history at the Missouri University of Science and Technology and author of The Dead and Those About To Die, from which this article is adapted
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