Crisbecq Battery After Capture

High on a hill overlooking flat fields and sea to the north, the Crisbecq coastal guns consisted of two neighboring casemated batteries of Heeresküstenartillerie-Regiment 1261 – the 2. Batterie armed with 105mm K331(f) guns, and the 3. Batterie near Crisbecq armed with two large R649 casemates (and a third under construction) for three 210 millimeter Czech-built Skoda Kanone 39 (K39) guns, and six open gun pits for a range of other artillery. The Todd Organization built R502 bunkers for ammunition, food and equipment stores, mess rooms, barracks, an infirmary, and defensive machine-gun and anti-aircraft emplacements. The first new Czech Skoda K39 fired on April 19; Allied bombing of Crisbecq began the next day. The K39S could launch 135-kilogram (three hundred-pound) shells at forty-second intervals up to thirty kilometers. Early firing revealed that the K39S couldn’t be loaded with the barrel elevated for long-range fire. The gun had to be nearly horizontal before the heavy shells could be pushed up the slope into the chamber, so it had to be retargeted after every shot. Wall markings helped crews restore the desired firing position, but remained an approximate, unreliable ranging tool. The finished casemate had a 45° field of fire left and right, could elevate thirty-five degrees and depress to minus eight degrees; the walls were generally two meters (six and a half feet) thick, but the reinforced concrete was thicker in some places.

The Saint-Marcouf/Crisbecq battery, also known as Marine Küsten Batterie Marcouf (“Naval Coastal Battery Marcouf”) or Seeziel Batterie Marcouf (“Sea Target Battery Marcouf”), was intended as the main strongpoint on the Cotentin peninsula’s east coast. Only two of four casemates were complete by D-Day. When the Crisbecq battery at Saint-Marcouf was fully garrisoned in early May 1944, the Germans had lowered the conscription age to seventeen. Many serving on Normandy’s Atlantic Wall were even younger. Some had papers assigning them to Azeville, but construction at Crisbecq, a few kilometers nearer the coast, was far behind schedule, and resources were diverted there. Oberleutnant Walter Ohmsen (June 7, 1911 – February 19, 1988) took command of Crisbecq on February 1, 1944.

Ohmsen was born in Elmshorn and joined the Reichsmarine in 1929. He became a Matrosengefreiter (Seaman Second class) in 1933 and a Bootsmannmaat (coxswain) a year later. He then served aboard the battleship Schleswig-Holstein, the training vessel Gorch Fock, the training ship Carl-Zeiss, the torpedo boat T-153, and the cruiser Königsberg, reaching Oberstabsbootsmann (“Chief Boatswain”) in 1940 and receiving the War Merit Cross 2nd class in April 1941. Assigned to the Naval Artillery School, Ohmsen became a Leutnant zur See (literally “Sea Lieutenant” – “Second Lieutenant – Naval Artillery”) in January 1942 and an Oberleutnant (“First Lieutenant”) shortly after, but in February 1944, he inherited a shambolic command at Crisbecq.

Including Ohmsen, the command comprised three officers, twenty-four non-commissioned officers, and 287 men of the Kriegsmarine. The unit was responsible for Marine-Artillerie-Abteilung 260 (MAA 260 — “260th Naval Coastal Artillery Battalion”), and the battery’s personnel were further augmented by members of 6. Grenadier-Regiment 919 (“Sixth Company, 919th Grenadier Regiment”) of the 709th Infanterie-Division (“709th Infantry Division”), bringing the estimated complement to about four hundred.

Unlike model battery Azeville, commanded by “old school” officer Hauptmann Doctor Hugo Treiber, Crisbecq had a reputation for lax discipline. It was regarded as a punishment posting, where failed officers bullied their juniors. Ohmsen could also be harsh with his men, but he was determined to turn around his new command. Conditions were also cramped and claustrophobic, with up to twenty men billeted in each R502 personnel bunker. Ohmsen favored addressing his troops from a huge circular concrete platform at the battery’s heart, the intended third casemate’s base. Work continued on the site day and night in the spring of 1944, but it was never completed.

Ohmsen tried to maintain morale, congratulating recruits for arriving in time to fight a real war rather than the phony one the garrison had fought for six months. To regular soldiers accustomed to threats and bullying, Ohmsen didn’t seem so bad. However, he still governed with a rod of iron, and men were often seen lugging bags of cement around the perimeter as punishment.

Crisbecq was easily identifiable. By mid-May, more than eight hundred bombs had fallen on the battery and its immediate vicinity. After a particularly heavy raid, Ohmsen suspended firing. Unwittingly or not, the self-obsessed Ohmsen had protected his guns from the worst bombing. The Oberleutenant hadn’t placed his guns as ordered. They were not at the promontory’s highest point, as regulations required, denying the enemy an easy fix. The casemate foundations were dug nearly four meters deeper than planned and finished late. But the depth created a steady downhill slope from munitions stores deep inside covered tunnels and trenches, feeding the guns even after the ground above was blasted beyond recognition. Ohmsen regarded the security of Crisbecq as a personal quest. That fastidiousness showed a week before the Americans landed. He took the garrison’s smallest man to a cliff north of the battery, where a sewage outfall served every bunker. Bombing had exposed a concrete sluice descending underground. The unfortunate soldier was lowered by rope into the slime and told to report what he found. When he told his commander there was a steel grille blocking the shaft about twenty meters down, he said, “Good, then nobody’s going to be able to get behind us that way.” Ordinary troops spent the days before the invasion building casemates, with some munitions training and small-arms practice. Ohmsen expected a siege if the Allies broke off the beaches in his sector, though he couldn’t know Crisbecq would be at D-Day’s sharp end. By June 1944, the landscape around tiny Saint-Marcouf was cratered, with scorched gorse barely tufting above ground. Allied air supremacy let Spitfires and Mosquitos reconnoiter Normandy’s coast unopposed, and Crisbecq was mapped as soon as test-firing began.

Defenses were refined until D-Day as the garrison tried to recover time lost through earlier indiscipline. Attacking from the south or east meant scaling cliffs, so those approaches were low priority. The northern and western approaches crossed level ground. Rommel had personally inspected the area and specified the construction of a minefield. As usual, Ohmsen supervised the work and ensured it was thorough.

A single road crossed the minefield, but a deep, mined trench cut it. A steel bridge spanned the gap, pivoted from the Crisbecq side and winched upright to form a wall. The minefield was the widest on the Cotentin peninsula. It ran between two prominently marked fences, about 200 meters apart. Azeville’s officers protested that Crisbecq was using mines intended for them, so Ohmsen laid his share only along the outer perimeter, leaving the rest to the enemy’s imagination. Unknown at Crisbecq, the battery stood at the western end of a planned sixty-mile chain of beachheads.

On Monday, June 5, stormy Channel weather put local garrisons at battle stations because of a forecast dawn high tide. Ohmsen refused to keep his men idle in full combat gear, but ordered more firing practice and sent the range-boat into the bay. The trials went well, but air-raid sirens sounded again before nightfall. For the next eight hours, waves of American bombers pounded the Cherbourg peninsula, and around six hundred tons of high explosive fell on Crisbecq and Azeville.

Explosions rocked the battery without seriously damaging the guns, though dust and rubble partly blocked the casemates. Crews were still clearing masonry when the sirens wailed again, almost as soon as the all-clear. This time, though, it was a call to battle stations. D-Day had begun.

On D-Day morning, they fired at the United States Navy destroyers USS Corry (DD-463) and USS Fitch (DD-462) around dawn. Both were meant to be shielded by a smokescreen, but Corry came under fire as soon as it emerged. While evading fire, Corry struck a mine around 0633 Hours and broke in half. German accounts blamed Crisbecq’s guns; a later United States Navy inquiry concluded it was a mine. Corry’s loss remains controversial. If German batteries sank it, Corry was D-Day’s only major warship lost to coastal guns. Both batteries then endured continuous naval bombardment, first from USS Quincy and later USS Nevada. The Crisbecq battery lost the first of three guns in the early morning exchange, the second at 1557 Hours, and the last at 1830 Hours. Both Crisbecq casemates took many direct naval hits but kept firing. Ohmsen had been vilified for delaying construction to build heavy submarine nets into the roof, but they caught tonnes of masonry and probably saved many lives.

Ten miles to the East, the US Army encountered disaster and carnage on Omaha Beach, but the stretch of sand extending eastward just below the Pointe du Hoc promontory was code-named Utah, and there the American invasion was proving far more successful.

For the first few hours, none of this held any interest for Oberleutnant Ohmsen. His predefined targets were out in the bay, and his three main guns were still intact, including the one in the half-built third casemate, which was open to the sky.

Crisbecq was the first major battery to identify the invading forces, around 0500 Hours, but Ohmsen still waited almost an hour for permission to fire. By around 0600 Hours, all three Skoda K39S had been cleared of debris resulting from the night’s bombardment, and each was test-fired at longer range targets during the next few minutes.

Among several warships in proximity within the western end of the Bay of Seine was one already firing at the battery itself. From his elevated observation bunker a little south of the battery, Ohmsen identified it as a light cruiser, though in fact it was USS Corry, a destroyer.

Just after 6.30 am, all three K39S at his disposal fired on the ship at under four miles range – point blank in artillery terms, given the size of the guns. Ohmsen reported that a salvo of three shells hit the Corry midships almost simultaneously, breaking its back in an explosion. It sank within minutes, with the loss of twenty-four of its crew. Corry was the only sinking of a warship by a shore battery on D-Day itself. But the Allies were determined not to acknowledge the threat posed by a battery like Crisbecq for fear of affecting the morale of invading troops. After initially reporting that the Corry had been struck by shell fire, her commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander George D. Hoffman (April 6, 1911 – December 27, 1991), apparently changed his mind and told his superiors that the ship had struck a mine. Several of Corry’s crew, both officers and enlisted, also believed that she was sunk more as a result of the Germans’ artillery fire than by the mine.

The first day of fighting, D-Day itself, saw a relentless bombardment of Crisbecq and, for the large part, the garrison was almost powerless to fight back. The sinking of the USS Corry had taught the Allied naval commanders a lesson, and the larger ships now stood off the coast, outside the angle of fire of the battery’s K39S. Casemate construction meant that the guns could be maneuvered through approximately 120 degrees. At the same time, the K39, operating in the unfinished emplacement, could pivot on its base by more than 150 degrees, but pushing the boundaries further could lead to disaster. At one point, the crew of the Number Two gun had their barrel tight against the edge of the opening, but when fired, a huge chunk of concrete broke off and rebounded around the casemate – that tactic wasn’t tried again.

Ohmsen redirected fire towards Utah Beach, trying to stem the flood of Americans from the Fourth Infantry Division that were already pushing over the dunes toward the strongpoint at La Madeleine. But Crisbecq’s guns were constantly overshooting their targets. On that first day, it was mainly the guns gunfire from Azeville that bombarded the landing area but, by the time they had been brought into action, the first waves had cleared the beach and were plotting to work their way towards joining up with the United States Army Eighty-Second and 101st Airborne Divisions, which had established a command post in the village of Sainte Mere Eglise after a bloody street battle with outlying sections of the Nazi German Ninety-First Infantry Division and attached Austrian antiaircraft gun crews. The machine gun nests on the bluffs surrounding Crisbecq were keeping the advancing Americans pinned down, however, and radio reports of an American massacre in the east towards Vierville lifted garrison morale.

As far as the Germans were aware, the invasion had been repulsed. However, they still heard nothing about the fighting farther east or that the British and Canadians were already pouring inland around Arromanches. They just had no concept of the width of the invasion front in Normandy or how massive the Allied force now in France was.

Those commanding the Fourth Infantry Division had confidently expected to overrun the Crisbecq/Saint Marcouf battery before nightfall on D-Day. Still, the most advanced units had barely cleared Utah beach. They were concentrated two kilometers east of their intended position after the tide had dragged them north of their intended landing position. The eventual breakthrough at Utah only came about when the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions pushed toward Saint Martin de Varreville from Sainte Mere Eglise. However, the first round of engagements in the vicinity of Crisbecq saw the 101st sustain severe losses. Utah Beach was by no means as bloody for the Americans as Omaha, but casualties were still a lot higher than on either of the British beaches or the Canadian one, and the progress was slower, too.

Crisbecq, too, was to suffer on D-Day itself. At around 0430 Hours, the Number Three gun in its partly-built casemate took a direct hit from either the USS Quincy (CA-71) or the USS Nevada (BB-36). Most of its crew were killed, and the gun was disabled. Walter Ohmsen suffered a severe shrapnel injury to his left arm around this time, though it was never confirmed that he was in the vicinity of the gun when it was hit.

As dusk began to gather, the Americans finally started to move away from Utah beach. “Exit 2” had been cleared of obstacles, meaning the invasion force could land their tanks and armored half-tracks and move onto pre-planned targets in the Western sector. The Germans were kept at a relative arm’s length as the Allies enjoyed near-total air supremacy, and with the Allies making rapid progress farther east, the speed of the Americans’ advance was no longer critical. The United States Navy, therefore, began to target artillery field pieces in the area. Two 105 millimeter guns stationed beside a road junction between Azeville and Crisbecq were destroyed. They were all but one of the six local anti-aircraft emplacements, preventing them from using their 37-millimeter guns against the advancing troops and tanks.

The only real threat to the relentless push inland was the artillery of the Saint Marcouf battery. Crisbecq and Azeville had always been major strategic targets for the Allies, and the garrisons now had to prepare themselves for a siege. A sense of bewilderment had descended over the Crisbecq battery. Every few minutes, the ground shook as the fourteen-inch (356-millimeter) guns of USS Nevada rained shells down from her position anchored in the bay. The men just carried on with their duties, taking shells from their boxes and manhandling them onto the small cart on rails that carried them the hundred feet or so to the Number One blockhouse, anytime expecting a shell to land on the ammunition bunker and wipe out the garrison. But Ohmsen, arm bandaged and in a sling, was calmness personified and made sure his men didn’t have time to dwell on what would happen should the Nevada find her range. He ordered the men to remove all the shells from their boxes, then had them smash the wooden crates with crowbars and axes, stacking the resulting timber alongside the bunker walls. Given something to do, men almost forgot about the bombardment.

By the morning of June 7, Ohmsen felt confident enough of the immediate security of Crisbecq’s perimeter that he sent second-in-command, Leutnant (“Lieutenant”) Grieg out onto the road between the battery and Azeville on a fact-finding mission. He was given a hundred men to reconnoiter beyond the minefields, but hardly encountered any American infantry. Grieg’s men did, however, capture some lost paratroopers after they came across a downed American airman carrying a hand-held clicker being used for identification purposes. Grieg guessed its use and spent the late morning sending out dummy calls, rounding up paratroopers who answered.

The sudden need to oversee twenty prisoners of war didn’t go down well with Ohmsen. However, there were no facilities to guarantee their security or any means to feed them. After collecting their names and numbers and confiscating their boots, he locked them in the battery’s strongroom with a supply of bread and water, a couple of chamber pots, and a pack of playing cards. It is said the last-named was a rare act of compassion shown by Ohmsen, but after some of the prisoners were abusive, he theatrically removed one of the playing cards and slipped it into his pocket before tossing the pack to them. The armored door was then bolted and padlocked behind him.

At just before 1200 Hours, June 7, orders were given to the gun crews to begin firing until further notice. Number One gun was to aim at the beach area around the Wiederstandnest 5 (WN5 – “Resistance Nest”) at Saint Martin de Varreville at 10-minute intervals, day and night, while Number Two gun was to fire on offshore targets every twenty minutes as long as daylight permitted. 10 minutes was about the fastest firing rate a K39 could sustain before the barrel overheated. If Ohmsen’s men could keep up the firing rate, the Crisbecq battery would run out of ammunition sometime in the early hours of June 11. By then, Ohmsen reasoned, the battle would be over one way or another. Firing to a strict schedule was typical of the discipline Ohmsen inflicted on his men and twofold in its reasoning. He endeavored not only to concentrate the minds of the garrison on the task in hand but also to convince the enemy that the sustained barrage against the Crisbecq battery was having no effect whatsoever.

He only half-succeeded, however. The Americans had begun to pick up the pace once clear of the beaches and were now within hailing distance of Crisbecq – a first direct ground assault was launched as night fell on 7 June. A British-designed Sherman “Crab” equipped with mine-detonating flails came crashing through the remains of the wood behind the battery and plowed a path some fifty meters beyond the outer perimeter fence before being disabled by a mine exploding underneath one of its tracks. The tank crew was unaware of a thirty-seven millimeter anti-aircraft cannon that had been trained on them throughout their advance. It was hidden beneath a mound of barbed wire encircling the Number One casemate, within a hastily constructed pyramid of surplus steel plate. Grieg had ordered the gunner to hold fire until the tank cleared the mined area, so the vehicle’s crew could escape via the floor hatch and retreat in a crouch along the path they had cleared.

Ohmsen convinced himself that the Americans would not try the same tactic again, as the flail hadn’t got halfway across the minefield, but the truth was the tank had only been turned off by the very last mine in its path and was defenseless in that area.

The following morning, the Americans tried a different route. Rope ladders were put in place, and men began scaling the cliff directly below the Number One casemate. But Ohmsen had foreseen the possibility of a direct frontal assault and positioned a heavy machine gun inside the casemate at the sea-facing end of the aperture. It was even fitted with a periscope so the gunner didn’t have to expose himself to return fire. A combination of barbed wire and mines had also been dug into the coastal path running beneath the casemate to deter attack from the flank.

The first wave of infantry attacked just before dawn, seconds after the gun had recoiled from firing down onto the beach. But the gun crew was on their guard while the barrel was raised in preparation for reloading. At any sign of movement in the scrub at the edge of the cliff, the barrel was to be raised again to negate the possibility of a grenade being thrown down the barrel. The American troops charged from the cover of the bushes, but those in the front rank were cut down by the machine gun before they’d barely covered a quarter of the hundred meters to the casemate itself — those in the second wave turned tail and threw themselves back into the scrub. About twenty minutes later, however, they came again, and though dozens were killed or wounded by the machine gun and others became entangled in the barbed wire, some got through and climbed onto the roof of the casemate. A Bangalore torpedo was forced through an aperture, causing a large explosion inside the gun control room at one end of the blockhouse.

Ohmsen’s reaction became part of folklore in German military history. Picking up the telephone, he said a pre-agreed codeword, and one of the World War I-vintage 105 millimeter Schneider cannons at the Azeville battery fired a shell into the casemate. The Americans scurrying across the top of the battery never stood a chance, and those still moving forward were too dazed to put up much resistance when Grieg’s Grenadiers, backed by a further contingent from Azeville under the command of Leutnant Geissler, emerged from the blockhouse. The Germans lost three men themselves in firing on their own battery, burned to death in the control room, and several more were injured. The damage can still be seen today at what is now the Crisbecq museum. But the Americans’ losses were much greater, and they were forced to rethink their strategy for capturing the battery.

Ohmsen achieved something remarkable during the siege of Crisbecq. It could be argued that he was always in a no-win situation. The battery was ill-disciplined when he arrived, and none of his superiors would have been surprised had it continued that way.

Crisbecq was going to fall sooner or later once the Americans had established a beachhead, and resistance only meant prolonged hardship for the garrison and mounting casualties. Ohmsen wasn’t even an attractive or particularly endearing character. He was described as aloof and often derogatory by his men, and though he liked to supervise projects personally, he was never known to get his hands dirty. But he made up for much of that with an almost uncanny ability to second-guess the enemy. He appeared to anticipate every eventuality and was unflappable under pressure, and his men were prepared to trust him because of it. Even when the two intact casemates were little more than blackened shells, surrounded by scorched earth and charred bodies, men still believed he would get them out alive – and some he did.

In the early hours of June 9, Ohmsen gave orders for his men to use the shell-boxes they’d been systematically breaking apart to make 2-meter-wide (6.5 feet) bridges capable of supporting half a ton in weight, one 5 meters long and the other 2. They were meticulously designed, with abutments positioned to engage with the casemate masonry. As well as the bridges, the men in the casemates were told to send a sealed drum of gasoline, with the strap handle pried open so that it could accommodate a stick grenade. Finally, Ohmsen wanted the grenade itself and some cloth to wedge it in place under the handle.

The first shorter bridge was to span the gap between the gun base and the lip of the casemate aperture, while the longer bridge overhung the aperture and stretched beyond the barbed wire in front of the casemate. It only took a short time to put everything in place, and everything was achieved under the cover of darkness so the American snipers, suspected of observing from an adjacent field, couldn’t disrupt operations. The grenade was fitted to the fuel drum before it was rolled out over the first bridge. Poised at the aperture mouth, Ohmsen pulled the pin himself, and two men pushed the drum over the edge. Everyone dived for cover as Ohmsen watched through the periscope of the machine gun.

The improvised explosive device did its job. The drum picked up speed as the ramp slope increased, flattening the barbed wire. It rolled quickly down the hill, now devoid of any foliage, and plunged out of sight over the ridge. A moment later, a huge blast lit the night with a sheet of flame, followed by screams in the darkness. Ohmsen calmly told everyone to be on their guard in case the Americans attempted another dawn raid, and gave the command to resume the firing cycle, but he did allow some of his men to grab some sleep for the first time in more than 48 hours.

Thursday had been a bad day for the United States Army 4th Infantry at Crisbecq, and the gasoline drum blast had begun on Friday badly as well. No surprise, then, that for the remainder of June 9, the Americans concentrated the bulk of their operations against the Azeville battery. Azeville’s commander was Hauptmann Hugo Treiber, a good soldier but not one who pursued his duty to the Nazis with the same zeal as Ohmsen. The Americans also had detailed plans of the defenses of the Azeville battery because the French Resistance had men in the adjoining village and had visited the site on several occasions. There were no submarine nets on the casemates and only token roadblocks on the approach roads. Crisbecq had the advantage of location as well – Azeville had no cliffs to protect it.

The Americans still could not believe that Crisbecq’s commander had ordered a strike on his own battery, but they redoubled their efforts to force the garrison to surrender. On Saturday, June 10, they bombarded the site throughout the night, causing the partial collapse of the roof of the Number Two casemate. The submarine nets prevented most of the masonry from falling in, but the gun was still buried and barely functioning. There were only a dozen shells left in its bunker in any case.

Number One gun was still firing on the beach around the clock, but the Americans were now swarming forward in waves up the cliffs on the east side of the battery. The mines on the path had been cleared, and the barbed wire cut away. They had now fought their way into the trenches of Crisbecq and were systematically clearing the personnel bunkers with flamethrowers. The Germans fought back with small arms fire, the machine gun Tobrukstände (“Tobruk Stands” – armored pillboxes) having been evacuated or destroyed. Ohmsen, himself, was hit by a rifle round in the same arm that was already wounded. It’s estimated that more than a hundred and fifty men on both sides lost their lives in the fierce close-quarter firefight that ensued, but the Americans were again forced to withdraw as night fell.

After nightfall, Ohmsen gathered his surviving men around him. The mood was very somber – barely a fifth of the original garrison of more than four hundred men was left standing. Leutnant Grieg was particularly morose and had retreated into a bottle of brandy intended as a birthday present for Ohmsen—hardly any of his men from 919. Grenadier-Regiment had survived, yet he had emerged virtually unscathed from the carnage. The smell of death was everywhere – the stench of rotting corpses and cordite settling in the ruins of the bunkers. The ammunition available for the Number 1 gun was virtually spent.

But as daylight broke, it appeared the Americans classed the taking of Crisbecq among their priorities. Ohmsen would probably have surrendered had they attacked, but Allied forces were now pouring ashore without serious opposition up and down the Normandy coast. German forces in the Cherbourg peninsula had been effectively cut off, and there was now no need to risk further high casualties in operations against heavily defended sites without strategic importance. Ohmsen’s left arm was now a mess. The bullet had gone through his palm and exited close to his elbow. Still, only two corpsmen remained, the doctor and medical orderly for Saint Marcouf having been killed on the road between Crisbecq and Azeville in the twenty-four hours after D-Day. The shrapnel wound of a few days earlier was also infected, but there was little morphine left, so Ohmsen poured iodine over the wound and asked his men to bandage the entire arm.

Admiral Walter Hennecke (May 23, 1898 – January 1, 1984), to whom Ohmsen had reported the initial sighting of the Allied invasion fleet on D-Day, telephoned Crisbecq’s commandant during the afternoon of June 11. The Supreme Commander of Marine Command at Cherbourg offered his congratulations for a heroic defense but ordered Ohmsen to gather his men together and abandon the battery.

Ohmsen didn’t protest; he knew it was the right decision. Number One gun was down to its last few shells, and he saw no point in sacrificing his men to a lost cause.

At about 0200 Hours on the morning of June 12, 79 survivors walked out of the Crisebecq Battery. They followed Ohmsen through the minefield to the north west, clambering over the abandoned British Sherman Crab and following its tracks into the wood beyond. They were unmolested because the Allies thought the route impassable and hadn’t posted any sentries. They carried their wounded on hastily-constructed stretchers, using shell boxes, flags, and bed sheets. Just before dawn, almost three hours later, they reached the German lines and the headquarters of 26.Artillerie Regiment near La Pernelle. It was Ohmsen’s last act in command of the Crisbecq battery and probably his most compassionate.

The Americans entered the trenches of the Crisbecq battery later that morning in eerie silence. They found twenty of their compatriots locked in the strong room and cables snaking all over the site. The site was immediately evacuated again, and it took sappers more than a week before they realized the cables were nothing more than yet another ploy to delay the Allied advance. Ohmsen and his men hadn’t wasted their final hours at Crisbecq; According to several accounts, a note was found attached to the breech of the now-silent Number One gun. It read as follows: “Dearest Enemies, You know that these are fine guns. Please care for them. Heil Hitler and Adieu.”

Walter Ohmsen received the Knight’s Cross for organizing the defense of the Crisbecq battery. He insisted on rejoining the front line, despite the injuries to his left arm, but was finally captured by American forces at Quineville, south of Cherbourg, almost three weeks after D-Day.

Ohmsen survived the war in captivity and, following his release, worked for the Schleswig-Holstein agricultural ministry. He ran for public office in 1954 but still faced his adversaries head-on, criticizing his boss during an election speech and ultimately finding himself out of a job. He joined up again in March 1956 as a Kapitänleutant of the Bundesmarine and was promoted to Korvettenkapitän (Corvette Captain) in November 1957 and Fregattenkapitän (Frigate Captain) in August 1965. He retired in September 1967.

Between 1968 and 1978, Ohmsen became a key figure in international sailing events, helping to organize the 1972 Munich Olympics. He also served on the consultative council of the city of Kiel. He helped channel support for war victims, for which he received the Freiherr von Stein commemorative medal and the Federal Cross of Merit, 2nd Class. Walter Ohmsen died in Kiel, February, 19, 1988, aged 77.