Near-Death on Omaha Beach: CAPT Sidney Salomon

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Captain Sidney Salomon. Salomon served in World War II with the Army Rangers, an elite American unit that trained and operated with the famous British Commandos. During the Invasion of Normandy, it was Salomon’s job to storm the beach, climb a cliff, take a mortar position, and then storm a fortified house that held an automatic weapon.

Lt. Sidney Salomon:

I enlisted in March of 1942. I was working out in Wisconsin for a Wisconsin paper mill. I've been in sales all my business career. And that was shortly after Pearl Harbor then I decided, “Well, I think I better get into service.” My home is originally from North Jersey, so I took a leave of absence from the company and came home and told my mother and father, “I'm going down and enlist,” and that's what I did.

I went in basic training and soon as I enlisted, I said, “Okay, now how do I get to be an officer?” And the recruiting guy looked at me and he said, “Oh, you'll have to go through basic training first.” I said, “Okay, then what do I do?” “Then you apply then.” I said, “All right.” So, I took my basic training which happened to be down in Fort Benning in Georgia. And right there I went up to the first sergeant and I said, “Okay, I want to put in for OCS.” And he said, “Salomon, I'm just going to take you out, I'm just going to give you stripes and then going out in cadre and open up a new camp, you and the six others.” “Well, I appreciate that, and thank you, but okay, I'll go along, but I'm going to put in for OCS at the next place.” He said, “That's alright.” It took me a month to get organized again, put in for OCS, I was accepted.

Went back to Fort Benning, to the infantry school and the end of November I had my commission as a second lieutenant. So, from March of 1942 to end of November, I went from a private to a second lieutenant.

Well, I wanted to get in something a little bit more than just a plain army. So, at OCS, I immediately put in for paratroops soon as I got my commission, and quite frankly, you're getting a hundred dollars more a month so that interested me. But then I couldn't pass the physical because I had a football knee from playing football in high school and college, and I was pretty much down on that.

But then I went to cut my assignment at one place at Camp Croft and was there for two months, I guess, and then to the hundredth division at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. And after being in there for about four months, I didn't want any part of an infantry division in combat, I wanted in something glamorous. So, the call came down for volunteers for the Rangers and I immediately applied for that and was accepted.

There wasn't any book about the Rangers, so all the officers got together and we had a book written by a commando, and the commandos used, and we used that plus our own initiative, and we just tried to keep a couple of days ahead of the program.

I would say we went through a thousand men, under 500 men to a battalion. And so, we probably went through a thousand, 1,500 men in our let's see, three months of training because while they were all volunteers, something was a little bit haphazard about it, because there are a lot of … even infantry commanders were not familiar with the Rangers.

And when they saw a bulletin come through the army asking for volunteers, some of those infantry commanders decided this is the way to get rid of some of the eight balls. So, that's what they did. They said, “You just volunteered for the Rangers.” So, we went through easily, a thousand, 1,500 men before we got down to the 500 men that we thought were the tops. We climbed mountains, and we went on 15, 20-mile hikes and that weeded out a lot of them.

I'm going to take a guess and try to recall what we did 12 minutes to a mile, which I think is pretty good. And that weeded it. Carrying it equipment too, and a rifle. And we always had live fire. We always lived ammunition with our training.

We went down and we took amphibious training down in Florida then we came up to Fort Dix, did concentrated training there. And again, speed marches were the norm then over to England. Training differed as soon as we got to England, then it becam e more thorough and more detailed. Bear in mind that all during this time, we had no idea that we would be in the invasion. Nothing was ever said to us about that or about any invasion. We all figured, “Oh, there got to be some invasion,” because that's what all the headlines were in whether even the army newspapers that was going to come about. So, we're on the Atlantic Ocean side of England, in our first training site and on the Atlantic Ocean side, it was a seaside resort area, and we climbed cliffs there. And we're fortunate in that one while we were in England, about every two months, we would train our station as to where we were training. So, we actually got to see southwestern, southern, and southeastern England. So, it wasn't great in that respect but as we look back at it later on, every time we moved, those cliffs getting higher and higher.

Now, in addition to climbing cliffs, we also our speed marches went from 15 miles to 25, 30 miles a day. And that, again, everybody was in excellent physical condition at that time and live ammunition again and we started firing at each other.

And playing with dynamite. Trinitrotoluene I guess it was. and we lost a few men by — when you get too confident with the explosives that can happen, getting the overconfidence, and we'd lose some men because of that.

Now, I'm going to switch around a bit now, instead of the training, because that training, we were on the ground and we did actual cliff climbing and firing with live ammunition, always with live ammunition and speed marching.

But I think our training was unique in the army because most of the time we lived with the English people and only a very small, short time did we live in an army encampment. And my four kids were growing up when they were small, I used to explain to them, I always explained to my wife and my kids about my army experience as not one of the type to bottle in myself. I told them about it and when we had our reunions, I took the whole family with him. But I used to tell the kids when they were small, and I said one of the reasons for the American Revolution was the fact that in the Boston area, the Boston area colonists were forced to take in British troops and quarter them. Now we did it in England, but there the English people volunteered to take us in and that was quite a unique experience because there'd be maybe one man to a home or two men to a home. And when I give talks and whether it's two adults or two high school kids, and I say, “You cannot imagine a soldier from a foreign country coming up to your door, knocking on the door and introducing himself.” And here he has a rifle over his arm and a full cartridge of live ammunition and that soldier is going to live in your home.

Now, majority of the times, we just lived with the English people. We had a room in their home that applied to officers as well. We had two officers, another officer and myself too to the first home. We lived in and built on the Atlantic Ocean side. And they didn't have any children, but other homes had young children and the men lived well, depending on the type of home in which they lived.

Two weeks prior to the invasion, all the troops that were going to be in the initial invasion, that's the only time we were in an army encampment as such and we were in a barbed wire enclosure, and nobody went out and nobody came in. We could write all the letters we want but they were not going to be mailed, we were told that.

Then we knew we were part of the invasion. Not until two weeks prior to the invasion, when we were in this barb wire enclosed encampment, we knew all troops then. And not until then did we get our mission for the second Ranger battalion, then that was the second means we knew it, we were going to be in it.

The battalion had three separate missions. There're six-line companies to a Ranger battalion. Our D, E and F companies were going in at Pointe du Hoc or A and B companies were going in at the beach in front of the town of Vierville and C company, in which I was a first lieutenant at that time.

We had a separate mission. We were to go in at Pointe de la Percee, go over, cross the beach, and then climb a cliff and make our soil up there. Nobody went in ahead of us, and no troops were coming in behind us. Our A and B companies had other troops coming in at the same time, but ours was the only mission which there were no other troops ahead of us or behind us.

The intelligence told us there was a fortified house up there that was one of our missions. There was an automatic weapon up there, and there was also an artillery piece and a heavy millimeter mortar that could fire on the beach at Vierville, where th e main invasion force was coming in, where the 116th infantry of the 29th division was coming in and our A and B companies, and also the 5th Ranger Battalion.

Our H hour was at 6:30 in the morning. So, we were awakened at about between 3 and 3:30 AM in the morning. And those who wanted to eat could eat, not very many of them were in the mood to eat breakfast though, only the so-called chow hounds ate breakfast, and they regretted it later on. But between 4 and 4:30, we were alerted to go up on a boat deck because the landing craft were hanging in the davits of the Prince Charles.

And remember, the invasion was to be on the 5th of June, but because of the stormy weather and the rough seas, it was postponed for 24 hours. Well, on June 6th, the rain had stopped but the seas were still pretty choppy. And we got up on the boat deck, and by 4:30, we were climbing over there was a plank on the that the British seamen had put up on the on the railing, on the boat deck over to the landing craft.

And the landing craft was swinging with the motion of the boat so the British seamen were there, and they helped us to get up on the plank and then we walked over. Now it's dark, perfectly dark and they kept saying they would help us up there and we'd walk a plank, I felt just like a pirate daze. And they said, “Do not look down.”

Well, I looked down, I wanted to see why I shouldn't look down. And that was a great sight there, because way down there in the dark, you could see the phosphorescent of the ocean is lapped against the hull of the Prince Charles. But then we got into the landing craft, and now only two of us were going, because my platoon had one landing craft, and the first platoon had the other landing craft.

Now, in my landing craft, I had 37 men. Tide was at low tide just starting to come in. So, we approached the oh, we are probably 10 or 12 miles out on a channel and that took a good hour, maybe a little over an hour to get in. And so, by the time we reached the shore before we reached the shore, the dawn broke and when the dawn broke, and then as we got closer, and then we saw that we were headed right to where we wanted to go, well, everything was fine. But then as we got closer, I could see the concentric circles in the water around us and that was artillery and mortar shells landing.

Fortunately, none of them hit us, but they were landing all around us and you could see the circles because I was standing up there. Then as we got a little closer, you could hear the ping of the German machine gun of small arms fire hitting the steel hole landing craft.

We weren't scared. I would say some of the men may have been scared, I was not scared because I figured I was well-trained, and I didn't know what to be afraid of, so I'd never been in combat. I thought, those guys, it's just like going into a football game. You're trained and if you're not trained, if you didn't pay attention, if your coach didn't train you, why? Then you would have butterflies. Because you don't know what the other guy's going to do, and you don't read the papers and all we heard was that the Germans were supermen. Well, so were we, we had good training.In our dry run, in getting into the landing craft on shore, we had never got into the landing craft with full ammunition and a full supply of ammunition, nor the ration, the food rations that we were going to carry, because our kitchens and supply train trucks weren't going to come in until five days after the invasion. Never did we carry all that, what we should have. So, we get into the landing craft. Now, everybody's got five-day supply of ammunition, five-day supply of K rations, and what we call D bars, which looks like a Hershey bar, an inch square, three of them to a — that was a day's ration, and a one-inch square was a meal. And of course, psychologically when you ate that, you couldn't finish that one square and you knew it was just psychologically, it was so loaded with calories or whatever.

So, now we get into that landing craft, and everybody's so bulked up with the landing, there wasn't room for me to sit down. And I'm the first one going off as the lieutenant, I'm the first one that was going to jump off the ramp. So, I stood up next to the sub left tenant, the English sub left tenant, who was in charge of the two-landing craft and I stood next to him. He had a stand too that we're going in and I'm just standing there taking in the scenery , and when the small arms fire start pinging on the steel hole landing craft, every once in a while I'd squat down a little behind the steel door because I'm standing right in front of a steel door that the sub lieutenant is going … he's going to swing that open, and then the ramp is going to go down, and I'm going to jump to the right and then this is how we all planned in our dry runs. And the second man would go off to the left and ultimately right and left. In addition, the tide is just starting to come in. So, every time a man jumps off the boat is that much lighter, the tide is coming in, and we're going in. So, now the sub lieutenant calls out, “Go,” and I push open the door, he lets go of the rope with the ramp that goes down.

I jump off to the right, Sergeant Reed, who is the next man, he jumps off to the left. I land in water, about up to my waist. And I'm loaded down with ammunition, and I'm carrying a 1/6 millimeter mortar shell to have one more shell for my mortar section. And holding my Tommy gun over my up high so it doesn't get wet. And I'm trying to get my feet on flat on the bottom and just, and Sergeant Reed, the second man off to the left, he got hit just as he jumped off. So, I got my feet squared away, and Sergeant Reed is underneath the ramp. So, I reached over and grabbed him by the collar and yanked him out from underneath the landing craft, otherwise he would've been submarine. And I started up sloshing through the surf and up on the sand there. And I figured about, I guess maybe about 15 yards. And I dropped him and I said, “Sergeant the aid man will come and get you. I've got to get on my way.”

So, I started running, and I hadn't run more than maybe 10 yards and the mortar shell landed, a German mortar shell landed right behind me and killed and wounded my entire mortar section. And it knocked me, I just got shrapnel in my back, it knocked me flat on face down on the sand. And I just dropped the mortar shell down there, and I thought, “Man, I must be dead.” But then in the next instance where sand started kicking up in my face and then I realized, I'm not dead and I thought, “Hey, some machine gunner's got his beat on me, and he's getting the range, and I better get the heck up and run.” That's what I did. I picked up and ran and ran into the base of the cliff. And I was about a hundred yard, I'd say almost a hundred yards wide of sand that we had to cross.

Oh actually, the aid man came running over to me, and I started to take my jacket off and my shirt off and he picked out some shrapnel out of my back. And this was before the days of penicillin, so he took out a packet of sulfur powder and sprinkled that on where the shrapnel was and put a patch on it, said, “That's all I can do for now, Lieutenant.” Put my shirt back on, my jacket and I said, “Let's start up.”

Sergeant Golis, he was one time my platoon sergeant and we had an incident that happened that the first sergeant of the company was demoted. And so, my platoon sergeant was elevated to First Sergeant, but he did not want to leave the platoon. He wanted to go in with the platoon. I said, okay. Golis, his name, Sergeant Golis. And I said, “I'll get you in my boat, my landing craft but as the first sergeant, you're going to have to be in the stern.” I said “Unbeknownst to combat,” I said, “That'd be the safest portion in the rear.” I said, “I'm going to be the first one off.” And he's a regular army man too. And I said, “I'll be the first one off, I'm sure to get hit then, when you're about my size, you'll get a battlefield commission, you can have my uniform.” And as it so happened, when I got up underneath the cliff and I looked back, he just got mowed down by machine gun fire. And a real tough guy too, a young fellow, but he had been heavyweight boxing champion of the Department of Panama before he got into the Rangers. So, he was a tough guy, and he just kept moving until absolutely, they just cut him down.

Now, I've got all the figures, these are the official figures. This is where I say the Pointe du Hoc area was the glamorous one, ours with A and B had the most hazardous one and it was hazardous because we had to run across a hundred yards a beach before we started to climb up the cliff. In C company, 21 men were killed, 20 of them were killed crossing that beach in the first 10 or 15 minutes, only one man was killed up on top of the cliff. A total of 81 men killed but 52 men from A, B, and C, and 29 men from D, E and F, we had twice as many killed.

Because we told our men, “Do not lay down on the beach, run across to the base of the beach.” The 116th lost their men because now they were coming in front of Vierville, in front of the town of Vierville, where our A and B guys came in but there were beach obstacles. We didn't have any beach obstacles where we were because if we were the German soldiers, they figured what dumb soldiers would make a landing here at a cliff where they had to climb a cliff. We weren’t the dumb soldiers, we were the smart ones. But the beach obstacles, which were to prevent the tanks to come in and supposedly to get landing craft, the 116th regimen of the 29th, they hid behind these. You've seen pictures of those of combat time and that's where the men got killed. We told our guys, “Run across the beach, run.” You know, a man running is not a good a good target for somebody with a rifle but a stationary target is absolutely perfect.

As soon as I got up and ran, I was going to complete my mission. I had a responsibility to the rest of the men for my landing craft, for my platoon. And when we got up on top, the only thing I did was get all my men together.

We had nine men up there, out of the 37 men in my landing craft, I counted nine of us up on top, only two of those nine had not been wounded. Now, the other seven, of course, and counting me were lightly wounded. Still able to climb up there, the seriously wounded were still down below. But with nine men, I figured there's no point in continuing our mission. We're not an effective fighting force.

So, I'm laying in a shell hole there and just about 10 yards from the top of the cliff and that's when Bill Moody came, the other platoon leader came running over and jumped off to my right. And I said, “Bill, I just spotted a trench up ahead.” So, I pulled back down, and he reached up and peered out over the edge of the shell hole, and I looked there and I was wondering why he did that. Then I saw that he had been killed instantly and he'd been drilled right through to the far with a sniper fire. And so, I turned around and grabbed two men, and I said, “Follow me.” And we ran across to that trench, and we just started to go through that, clear out the trench, and I came to a dugout. I could see a dugout ahead and before I got to that, I was carrying a two white phosphorus grenades on my suspenders of my cartridge belt. So, I took that and I threw that ahead, put a curve on it and waited because it went in off in there. And then we waited, I don't know, maybe a minute or so and then we ran ahead and sprayed the inside of it, that was that.

Then we went on ahead, now we didn't go running ahead, we went cautiously, the three of us. And so, I was leading the way and then I came across the mortar position, which they said was up there and there it was like a great big manhole. And it wasn't manned, though, they were probably all in that so-called fortified house.

The Germans had five years to build a defensive system there, and just as from Pointe du Hoc from where our A and B companies went in to Pointe du Hoc, where D, E and F went in, there's five miles, and the Germans had that all manned, and they had five years to build a defensive system there. One of the pill boxes at Pointe du Hoc is still intact. It's the only one though that's intact, the others are all partially obliterated.

But you can see that and even where we landed at Pointe de la Percee, they built, there was a trench system there and dugouts just like World War II dugouts, but the cement roof on those dugouts, all I had to do when the bombardment came, when the Air Force came over, was to go in those dugouts, and I'm sure it was nerve wracking, and the cement dust came down on them, but nobody got hurt in there.

Interviewer:

So, your opposition was largely intact by the time you hit.

Sidney Salomon:

Absolutely. In addition, it was daylight, and they saw us come in. Really, they just figured there was a elements of a German division there. And in another respect their intelligence for the invasion was not the top, was not the best. I would say the maps that we got, that we received in C company, I think they must have gone to a tourist agency and asked for brochures for tourists because that's the type of maps that we had and that fortified house.

But when we got there, we thought, “Well, that was a farmhouse,” and it was made of a red brick, out of red brick, it wasn't fortified at all. It was a red brick house and the troops that were stationed in that area all along there, on top of the cliffs and down in the Vierville, that's where they lived.

We went into the hole there where the mortar was and it was, of course, I say it was like a manhole and it was cement lined. And on the wall where the targets point up at the beach where the main invasion force was coming in with all the elevations and the setting for … because they had flags up on the beach there. And everyone was just like a flag on a golf course and with that number painted on the side of the walls of the mortar hole was the elevation there. So, we just took the butts of our rifle and knocked out all the mechanism that sets it back and then went on. And we decided, well, then another trench came off to our right and I debated.

So, we went on a little ahead, but I figured, well, we don't know where that one to the right goes because to the left is the main invasion beach. And I went around, there was a curve ahead and went cautiously. And I thought, “I better not go too far because I don't know if anybody's going to come from the right and get us from behind.”

So, we went around this curve. It's just as clear today as it was 55 years ago and a German came from the opposite direction. Well, he was more startled than I was, and he stopped dead in his tracks, and I grabbed him. I thought maybe we ought to take one prisoner to maybe get some information. So, I had Steve grab him, took his weapons away from him, and I said, “Take him back and put him down the back of the cliff where Ralph Goranson was and maybe we can get some information.” So, he took him back and I don't know whether he gave him a push to get down there or whether or what. I couldn't care less. But I turned around and came back and I told Ralph that Bill had been killed and I said, “I think the best bet is for us to hold onto this ground up here.” Because we didn't have any communication with anybody else, our radios were gone and our drink. And Ralph was trying to get some of the less serious wounded who were able to make it, to go up to where A and B were coming in and try to make a contact with them so we could meet up with them. So, we stayed up there. I stayed up on top for the rest of the day and just made certain that nobody came in. And yeah, we dug a foxhole, we dug slit trenches up there, and I stayed up there that night.

These are my men who've been with me for not all of them since the inception, but majority of them as long as I've been in the Rangers. So, we have a camaraderie there, it very definitely is demoralizing. But also, I know that I'm in a mission. I'm responsible for a mission. I'm just one phase of an entire invasion.

I think it's in General Bradley's book that he wrote after the war, he was the army commander. He mentioned that C company was the first unit along the entire allied front to reach their primary objective. Well, we did reach their primary objective, but we didn't go beyond that. And both Ralph Goranson and I, he's a company commander, we decided best bet is to stay where we are. And just hold on to that piece of ground there. And I thoroughly agreed with that at the time, and even now, that we would not have been an effective fighting force for nine guys to go strolling along and trying to win the war.

When I woke up just after dawn, early in the morning, and up maybe 500, 700 yards away in the next field, couple of fields away, I guess. Here are two old French women rounding up the cows that hadn't been killed by the artillery, cows had to be milked that morning. So, they took the cows and rounded them up and took them in there.

Now Ralph sent up word, “We're going to meet A and B company.” Only one officer was alive, all the others had been killed and wounded either in A and B. So, we were going to meet the remnants of them out on the blacktop road that parallel the cliff was about three quarters of a mile from the cliff, and that's the road we were going to take anyway and get up to Pointe du Hoc to meet up with D, E and F there. So, we went up and met captain Arnold, the B Company was the only officer there, all the rest have been killed or seriously wounded.

So, we joined forces and started up that blacktop road, just as you see in the movies, a trail or war films, a trail on either side of the road and we're walking along there, and we came to the farm house where those the French women had been out rounding up the cows. And here they're out with cups of fresh milk from having milked the cows and cider, and a cup of old, elderly French men who were probably too old for service so they left them home and they were passing out here. There's not a lot of rifle fire going on, but there's artillery going on, and they're passing out cups of milk and cider to us as we walk up there, and we're walking up with our rifles out there ready. Well, I'm a city boy, and I know milk comes in bottles, so I didn't take any milk, that's it.

Now about 8, 9, 10 days after the invasion, that's when I was promoted to captain and took over B company and I stayed with B company to the end of the war by the end of the war, I'd had 200% turnover in B company. Now, not all of those were killed, but if they weren't killed, they were so seriously wounded. They weren't sent back to the company. And hey, this is war, this is not this is not a game, this is not a football game. When you get hurt in a football game and you go to the sidelines, a substitute comes in and takes your place but this is war, this is either I'm going to kill somebody before he kills me and it isn't a game. And we're mentally prepared for that, all of our training has been psychologically prepared for that. You got to be very close with some guys even though you came close with them over the times in service because I relied on them and by the same token, they relied on me to keep them alive.

This June and one of the trips back to Normandy, we're in … my first trip back was in 1979. At that time, I was national president of the Ranger Battalion Association. And I went to the military cemetery at that time, and I got the location of a lot of my men and I went to there, and I saluted them and I go back every five years and do that.

Now, this June, a reporter from the local newspaper where I lived, called me up and asked if he got an okay from the paper, could they go along, join the Rangers? And I said, “Yes.” So, he came with me and he came with us on our trip, and we went into the military cemetery there. I said, “Before we go anywhere else, I have what I call is my duty, my mission.” And I go there and have the location of these men's graves. They're 9,900 and some odd graves there, almost 10,000 graves there but I go and I salute them. The guys that were still there, not all of them are still there, some of them, the families had them brought back. But the reporter was there, and he wrote up about this and put it on the internet that night.

And it was in the headlines of my paper back home every morning for three mornings, because he was with us and did that. And people would stop me on the street and ask me about that I never knew before.

Now, one of my men was with me in June, fella by the name of Jim Roush and the reporter Steve Wartenberg, he went over, and he said … because I had introduced him to all the Rangers so we could interview them.

And he went over to Jim, and he started talking. He said, “What kind of a company commander was Sid.” And Jim's comment, and Steve couldn't get over this. He said, “Well, I'm alive because he kept me alive.” I couldn't keep all alive. That's all.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Captain Sidney Salomon. If you’d like to hear more D-Day stories, make sure to check out our page. From pilots to infantry, we have dozens of other first-hand accounts.

Thanks for listening to Warriors In Their Own Words. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We’re always looking to improve the show.

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