I’ve been re-reading one of my favorite books, and there’s a scene in it that really struck me. I’d forgotten this particular scene, or maybe it never really hit me before, because the last time I read it was long before Saving Private Ryan came out. It’s a WW2 tank book written by a former tank crewman who served four years in a Sherman tank during the war.
The scene I’m talking about is eerily reminiscent of the D-Day beach landing scene at the beginning of the Hanks’ movie, even though it was written nearly forty years earlier. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or if it provided inspiration, but the similarities are striking.
The novel is (now) called Hell Has No Heroes, by Wayne Robinson, but the title was Barbara back when I read it. I’m not sure when they changed it or why, but it’s relatively hard to find a pre-change version without spending a stupid amount of money. It’s only available to read Amish-fashion, on paper, which isn’t ideal given the state of my vision, but it’s definitely worth the eye strain.
Barbara is a DD, or Duplex Drive tank (see above), in a fictional independent tank battalion hitting Omaha Beach on D-Day during Operation Overlord. Every tank in the battalion has a name, the first letter of which corresponds to one of its companies, Able, Baker, Charlie, and Dog. Barbara and her crew are obviously in B Co.
Writing with accuracy and verisimilitude wouldn’t have been a stretch for the author. He was in a Sherman of the 743rd Tank Battalion when it landed between Dog Green and Easy Green on June 6th, 1944, in support of the 116th Regimental Combat Team. Reviewers have described it using phrases like “semi-autobiographical”, “barely fictional”, and similar terms. You can see why when you read it.
You can learn more about the author and the book on Breach-Bang-Clear, but in the meantime, read this. The scene focuses on “Col. Wesley Grant,” the Battalion Commander. See what you think.
Hell Has No Heroes (Excerpt) Chapter 11
IN THE CRASH of sound, Grant was hurled back from the deck of Battle Lady to the sand. At one moment he had been talking to his tanks over Ross’s radio, trying to get them to move on beyond the sea wall and off the beach, and in the next he was sprawled to the ground.
He was not hurt, only shaken. Quickly, he got to his feet and turned to climb back aboard Battle Lady. He was surprised to find he was some distance away from the tank. Before he could take a step, something else crashed near him, and he felt himself going down again. His helmet spun from his head.
There was no noise from this second explosion. He did not realize then that he had been deafened. His first thought was for his helmet. It lay a few yards away from him, and it seemed all-important that he recover it and put it back on his head at once. He crawled to it. His left shoulder felt numb, as though he had twisted it in his fall. When he reached his helmet, his left arm would not respond. He clapped the helmet back on with his right. Immediately, he felt more secure. He was aware that something was very wrong, very different about him, and then he knew what it was: the silence. Gunfire bursts were everywhere before his eyes on the beach, but he heard nothing. All sound of battle had been shut out. He had something very important he must do, but he could nto remember what it was. He could only consider the phenomenon of death amid total silence.
A soldier burdened with the tripod of a heavy machine gun walked toward him. The man seemed to be sleepwalking without being conscious of where his steps were leading. The rest of his squad with the gun and ammo were nowhere to be seen. Then, quite instantly and magically, the soldier and his tripod disappeared before Grant in a flash of flame. Grant felt the shock blast, but there was no sound o fexplosion. He stared numbly at the spot on the beach where the soldier had been walking. Only the gun tripod itself remained, mute evidence where it had fallen– nothing at all of the man who had been carrying it. Except there — a boot. One combat boot so near that Grant could have reached out and touched it if he wished. It was a boot with part of a leg still protruding, a shattered bit of flesh and bone mixed with bloody cloth. He could not be sure that this torn foot had not been there before, unnoticed. Somewhow it no longer seemed to matter, no more than one would regard a bit of chopped meat which had fallen from a butcher’s block onto the floor.
In the new unearthly silence of his lost hearing, Grant tried to recall what he should be doing. Hw was curiously powerless. It seemed to him at that moment he had become a spectator, an onlooker at some fantastic movie in which the sound track suddenly had been cut off. Yet he knew that the sodden corpses he could see rolling in the surf, the Channel refusing to let dead men rest, were real enough, and the bullets kicking up little spurts of dust- they could kill a man as surely if not as spectacularly as the mortar burst had eradicated the triped bearer. Not being able to hear the sound which accompanied death did not mean that death was no longer there. The drowned bodies being washed ashore and the lifeless forms of men now stretched from the water’s edge to the sea wall were proof enough. Everywhere he looked, men were still dying in sudden ways – sudden, that is, if the last grim touch of fate happened to be kind. The less fortunate, the mangled and the torn, lay writhing in agonies. Some of these wounded had been pulled behind the sea wall, but there were few medics left alive to look after them. Everywhere he looked, the invasion lay dying in its own agony as surely as any of the men there.
The invasion was being lost. It was being lost on an ever-narrowing strip of sand over which the impatient tide lapped eagerly toward the sea wall to where the survivors were pinned down. It was being lost at the sea wall, which had not been breached, not blasted open so that the tanks and men and vehicles could pour through. It was being lost because everything had gone wrong. The plan of attack was a scrap of paper, and the first assault wave was as doomed as the second — this as long as the men hugged the sea wall, caught blindly in the furious chaos of chattering guns and crashing shells, men immobilized in the confusion, lost from their units, with nothing left but the instinct for self-preservation. A sense of desperate discouragement swept through him. The invasion was being lost, and he was doing nothin gabout it, here on his hands and knees.
Grimly he commanded his body to obey his order to stand. It was in his mind to walk straight to the sea wall and organize some kind of movement inland before it was too late. But no sooner had he regained his feet than the sand and sky began spinning in a misty blur, and he knew his legs could not carry him. Rather than stagger clumsily, he allowed himself to fall forward to the ground again. It was just a question of steadying himself until the dizziness departed, he thought. Some inner prompting, some inner will apart from his conscious self, made Grant seek cover where he could gather together his wits and his strength. The scene about him had slipped out of focus. He sensed the dark, protective bulk of a tank close by and crawled toward it until his hands touched the steel, then kept crawling until he crouched beneath the overhang at the back where the doors to the engine compartment, now covered with water-proofed canvas, would be. As he crawled, he was conscious of a painful area around his left shoulder, but no more than a muscular ache. What bothered him most now was the throbbing and pounding inside his head which went with the dizziness. In palce of the unnatural silence folloiwn his first sensation of deafness,m his ears rang with an angry buzzing. But worse than this was the complete sense of futility, of failure — both for his own part in the operation and for the entire operation itself. He had seen the invasion stopped in the open. Yat least some of his tanks were still in action. There still might be a chance, the one chance, to get off the beach, out from under the heaviest fire. That would mean breaching the sea wall, smashing an opening in it, somewhere, anywhere. It had to be done before it was too late. Too late…
First, he must get himself under control. He forced himself to sit motionless, his back against the tank, his eyes closed, until the whirling circles behind the lids spun less madly, and he seemed to slip slowly into a dark, empty blankness where there was no sensation of any kind. Then he became aware of the gunfire- as loud and terrible as before. His hearing had returned. He opened his eyes, and there it was all as it had been earlier — the LCT burning, the great spread of ships standing out from shore, small boats approaching the breakers amid sudden white geysers. Ships and sky and sea remained in place. No longer spinning. His senses were clear. He could hear the guns again. He remembered what he had been doing. He must get to his feet and get back to Battle Lady, in command of his tanks.
Saving Private Ryan: Omaha Beach Scene
Okay, now that you’ve read that, watch this again. Powerful stuff, both the written word and the video.
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