D-Day Journal The Untold Story of a U.S. Ranger on Omaha Beach by John V.O. Kennard - an Excerpt by Koehler Books

D-Day Journal The Untold Story of a US Ranger on Omaha Beach D-Day training, invasion and combat experiences in uncensored letters home by one of the “Boys of Pointe du Hoc,” Lieutenant Frank L. Kennard, US 2nd Ranger Battalion

John V. o. Kennard

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VIRGINIA BEACH CAPE CHARLES

D-Day Journal Softcover

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED - No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author or the publisher. All pictures, unless otherwise noted, are either in the public domain, used with attribution, permission or from the personal collection of the author. All opinions expressed in this book are solely of the author. Printed in the United States of America

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Dedication Dedicated to all the soldiers of the 2nd Ranger Battalion who led the way to liberate Europe; especially to those heroic Rangers who, at one moment and place in time, from France to Czechoslovakia, gave their lives so that we, their children and grandchildren, might live in freedom.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When duty whispers low, “Thou must,” The youth replies, “I can.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Table of Contents Preface............................................................................................ ix Introduction ................................................................................... xi CHAPTER ONE: Joining The Rangers ....................................... Thanksgiving Day 1943 ................................................................. November 26 – December 5, 1943— Seven Days Crossing ................................................................ December 5 – 12, 1943—In a Replacement Depot World War 2 Special Operations Units ..................................... December 8 – 12, 1943—Ranger Interview ................................. Reflections on the Selection and Training of Rangers ...................

1 1 2 4 6 9

CHAPTER TWO: England........................................................ 13 December 1943 – January 1944—Training ................................... 13 January – February 1944— English Country Manor House Living...................................... 14 February 1944—Bloody Boots ...................................................... 16 March 1944—Cannon Shoot ......................................................... 19 April – May 1944—D-Day Assault Preparation ............................ 21 May 16 – 30, 1944—Final Preparations ........................................ 23 June 2 – 5, 1944—Last 72 Hours................................................... 23 June 5, 1944—“The Show Was On” .............................................. 24 CHAPTER THREE: D-Day Landing.......................................... 27 June 6, 1944—D-Day .................................................................... 33 Sergeant Leonard Lomell’s Firsthand Account.............................. 35 Air Force Preparations ....................................................................39 Captain Goranson’s Firsthand Account ..........................................41 Kennard’s Landing on Omaha Beach ............................................ 47

CHAPTER FOUR: Things Did Not Work Out As Planned ............ 55 June 6, 1944 .................................................................................. 55 Kennard's Dash ...............................................................................57 D-Day +1 ....................................................................................... 60 D-Day +2 ...................................................................................... 61 June 12, 1944—In France ............................................................. 61 June 14, 1944—Roasting a Cow ................................................... 62 June 18 – 19, 1944—Adjutant ...................................................... 63 June 22, 1944—Presidential Unit Citation ................................... 65 June 23, 1944—First US Newspaper ............................................ 67 June 27, 1944—One Bath ..............................................................68 June 28, 1944—Just Lucky ............................................................68 July 31, 1944—Reflections: Beach Assault .................................. 71 CHAPTER FIVE: Belgium, Luxembourg & Germany ................ 73 September 1944—Ranger Battalion Scroll.................................... 73 September, 1944—Brittany ........................................................... 75 Late September, 1944—Rudder’s Buick Escapade ....................... 76 November 18, 1944—Letter from Germany ................................. 80 November 19, 1944—Pushed Back ............................................... 81 December, 1944—Battle for Hill 400 ............................................ 81 May 1945—No Flag for General Patton’s Parade ......................... 84 Reflections: End of the War ........................................................... 88 Postscript ........................................................................................ 89 Appendix: 2nd Ranger Battalion Official D-Day “After Battle Report” ................................................................ 93 Frank L. Kennard 1923–2014 ........................................................ 99 Acknowledgments........................................................................ 101 Bibliography ................................................................................ 103 Endnotes....................................................................................... 105

Preface More than fifty years ago when I was a teenager in New Jersey, my father, Frank L. Kennard, who had served as lieutenant in the US 2nd Ranger Battalion and landed in the first waves on D-Day in France, gave me his WWII letters home. Each had been neatly typed and transcribed by his father’s secretary. My grandfather, William C. Kennard, owned a textile company in lower Manhattan. A stern and forceful man well read in American history, he instilled in his three sons, all of whom served in WWII,1 a sense of duty to record their experiences in letters and send them back home. I saved Dad’s letters and occasionally shared them with my six sisters and my brother. In 2004, I returned the letters to Dad before we went as a family to Normandy for the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day. That would be his last visit to Normandy. Dad passed at age ninety-one in April 2014, in Columbus, Ohio. Lieutenant Frank Kennard’s letters span about one year, from Thanksgiving Day 1943 in NYC when he boarded a troop ship to England to prepare with the Rangers for the invasion on D-Day, to November 1944 in Belgium and Germany, when the 2nd Ranger Battalion was fighting in the Hurtgen Forest in some of fiercest battles of the war in Europe. All the letters, which were passed to me, are included in this book. Each letter or reflection about my father’s experience is presented exactly as he wrote it; nothing within the letters themselves has been

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altered or added and nothing has been edited out. None of my father’s wartime letters have previously been published. It is likely that prior to publication in this book, none have been read outside Frank Kennard’s immediate family. I believe my father’s letters make a fresh and significant contribution to the historical record of the newly formed US 2nd Ranger Battalion during their assault training in England. They reveal new information and previously unreported details about the first wave landing at Omaha Beach. They add insight into the daily life of training, intense combat, and battlefield recovery by Ranger soldiers who fought gallantly in some of the toughest battles ever fought and won by US Army Infantry. Of the hundreds of soldiers in the 2nd Ranger Battalion who landed at Normandy in the early hours of D-Day, Kennard was one of the very few still on the front lines with the Rangers on VE Day, May 8, 1945. There is no other known contemporaneous record of this decorated combat unit from an officer with Lt. Kennard’s perspective.

Introduction The most important day of the twentieth century was June 6, 1944, the day the Allied invasion of Europe began on the beaches of Normandy, France. This day was the start to the end of World War II, and it will be forever known as D-Day. For my father, Lieutenant Frank L. Kennard, D-Day was a day he never forgot. On the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day in 1994, he told a newspaper journalist that he thought he was lucky to have lived past twenty-two. He had volunteered for overseas duty in wartime. He volunteered for the Army Rangers. He landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day, and his unit, the 2nd Ranger Battalion under legendary commander LTC James Rudder, was assigned one of World War II’s deadliest missions: take the cliffs and neutralize the big German guns at Pointe du Hoc. “I went to Fort Sill with fifty-one classmates from college. Ten among us went to Fort Jackson and four of us went overseas together on the same boat. I am the only one among the four who volunteered, and I am the only one who survived. The other three were killed within a few months.” Lt. Kennard graduated from Yale University in the summer of 1943 and joined the Rangers in England, where he trained for the invasion of France and landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day at about 9:30 AM, leading a cannon platoon. His platoon and two cannon mounted half-tracks struggled mightily upon landing, were shot up and took

D-Day Journal

heavy casualties. Kennard then gathered a mixed band of Omaha Beach landing survivors and initiated an independent action toward the big German guns at Pointe du Hoc. Stephen E. Ambrose, the premier historian of D-Day and author of the masterwork D-Day and also of Band of Brothers, wrote of my father’s landing with two companies from the 2nd Rangers, the 116th Regiment, and the 5th Ranger Battalion. He wrote “[they] experienced war at its most horrible, demanding and challenging.” Ambrose adds, “How they responded to this crisis with the fate of Omaha Beach and perhaps the whole invasion at stake, was testimony to the marvelous job General Marshall and all those old Regular Army officers and noncoms had done in turning these children of the depression into firstclass flighting men.” 2 Less than one month later, Kennard became the 2nd Ranger Battalion adjutant and served with the Rangers in that role through every battle until the end of the war. The US 2nd Ranger Battalion is one of the most highly decorated units in American military history. By April 1945, the men of the 2nd Ranger Battalion had earned 18 Distinguished Service Crosses, 73 Silver Stars, 64 Bronze Star Medals, 2 British Military Medals, an astonishing 542 Purple Hearts and a Presidential Unit Citation.3 On D-Day alone, Ranger casualties were about 50 percent.4 Wartime battle action of the 2nd Ranger Battalion during and after their Normandy landing on D-Day at the foot of the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, on nearby Pointe de la Percee, and on Omaha Beach has been reported, dramatized and recalled in many ways over the last seventy-five years.5 The 2nd Ranger Battalion’s heroic actions have been the subject of movies, biographies, military histories and even video games. One of President Reagan’s most moving and memorable speeches commemorated the fortieth anniversary of D-Day on June 6, 1984, at a ceremony overlooking the cliffs at Normandy. President Reagan said of the surviving members of the 2nd Ranger Battalion in attendance, “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a contixii

John V. O. Kennard

nent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.” Nearly seventy-five years after D-Day, one would expect that leading historians would have made note of, if not thoroughly described and assessed, the Omaha Beach landings and subsequent actions of the two cannon platoons within the headquarters company of the 2nd Ranger Battalion. With a rare exception, such is not the case. Further, despite the histories, films and stories about the 2nd Ranger Battalion, until now no battlefield journal and letters written by any soldier who served with the 2nd Ranger Battalion from D-day preparations until the unit was disbanded at the end of the Figure 1. Lt. Frank L. Kennard as a newly commissioned officer in 1943. A few months later war have been published. Lt. he joined the US 2nd Ranger Battalion, which Kennard’s account of the war landed in the first assault waves on D-Day on Omaha Beach. stands apart from any other published accounts of a soldier in the first waves of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. From the first-wave D-Day landings on Omaha Beach to the Battle for Brest and the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest where the 2nd Ranger Battalion led the assault on Hill 400, Bergstein, Lt. Kennard saw action in every 2nd Ranger Battalion battle until the war ended in 1945. Kennard was at the center of the legendary LTC James Earl Rudder’s headquarters leadership team, and he remained in a key role in battalion staff for Rudder’s successor, Major George S. Williams. Many after-action reports from the companies within the 2nd Ranger Battalion were written in whole or in part by Kennard for the xiii

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battalion commanding officer’s signature or endorsement up the chain of command. One in particular is the 2nd Ranger Battalion’s official D-Day landing “After Battle Report.” Beyond official reports, in spare moments when combat subsided and time permitted, my father faithfully and dutifully wrote an ongoing journal of events and reflections, which he sent home in the form of letters to his father and mother in Montclair, New Jersey. His uncensored letters were written before, during and following the Normandy invasion. He wrote about what he did and what he saw from the unique perspective afforded by his position within the battalion and with the granularity born of his appetite for detail and further shaped by his education. This is Lt. Kennard’s D-Day story. It is presented exactly as he recorded it in letters written within days following the actual events about which he writes. Kennard’s letters are supplemented by rare oral histories from four other D-Day soldiers in the 2nd Ranger Battalion. They include Lt. Conway Epperson, Kennard’s fellow Headquarters Company cannon platoon leader; Sergeant Leonard (Len) Lomell, whose team located and destroyed the German guns on Pointe du Hoc; Captain Ralph Goranson, who led Ranger Task Force B; and Lt. Gerald Heaney, LTC Rudder’s assistant for operations. Each adds new information and revelations about the battalion’s training, combat, and end-of-war experiences. Taken as a whole, these personal stories reveal the enthusiasm, confidence, fears, courage and indelible bond forged among the soldiers in the 2nd Ranger Battalion before and after D-Day.

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CHAPTER 1

Joining The Rangers

THANKSGIVING DAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1943 FORT DIX, NEW JERSEY, TO NEW YORK CITY Today is the DAY! Had a tremendous GI Thanksgiving dinner, complete with all the trimmings. After going through the chow line, there was a large table filled with candy, peanuts, fruit, celery, pickles, etc. Marched down to the big siding and loaded up into a train. Was carrying a lot of stuff. Had a bulging musette bag with a blanket roll tied on, and an overstuffed val pack.6 My footlocker had been put on the boat ahead of us and would ride in the hold. After a surprisingly short delay, our train came in. And shortly thereafter, we pulled out. After a while, we realized we were headed toward New York. Pulled into Jersey City, New Jersey Central Terminal, and embarked on a ferry. There were a few commuters who stared at us. We had to keep moving, so couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t pay them much attention. New York looked pretty as we rode across the river. And as the ferry nosed into the end of the pier 46, a band started to play. We debarked from the ferry and walked about halfway up the pier. We stayed in a column of twos while hot coffee and doughnuts were served by Red Cross girls and sundry other womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s services. Finally, turned up the gang plank. At the foot, I gave my name, and was answered by my first name and given a card which indicated my quarters on the ship. 1