| Original caption: “The beachhead is secure, but the price was high. A Coast Guard Combat Photographer came upon this monument to a dead American soldier somewhere on the shell-blasted shore of Normandy.” A Ranger of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, Provisional Ranger Group killed in action, has been buried with his M1 helmet on top of a British Vickers K Gun, the muzzle of which is stuck into the soil. 2nd Rangers were tasked with eliminating French-made 155 millimeter (6.1 inch) artillery that could fire on Omaha Beach and destroy the invasion landing craft. Although it was a British machine gun chambered for the .303 caliber (7.92 millimeter) British cartridge, K Guns were used by 2nd Rangers during the battle at Pointe Du Hoc; they were mounted on the ends of extending ladders affixed on DUKW amphibious trucks. A belt of German 7.92 x 57 millimeter (.323 caliber) Mauser cartridges for the MG34/42 machine gun lies on a wooden crate in the foreground and a spent American M22 Colored Smoke Rifle Grenade is just above it. The K Gun’s drum magazine is in the dirt at far right. The 2nd Rangers’ battalion aid station was set up at the Command Post atop Pointe du Hoc at 0745 Hours on June 6, 1944, by Captain Walter E. “Doc” Block (December 17, 1903 – December 8, 1944). Medic Private 1st Class Charles W. Korb (February 24, 1921 – March 21, 1996) was shot in the hand and couldn’t climb up the toggle rope, so he cared for the wounded on the beach below the cliffs. Unable to immediately evacuate the wounded on top of Pointe du Hoc, medics treated men under fire and left them in position. The dead were initially strewn about or lying in rows where they had fallen, and later collected by their comrades and Graves Registration. The Ranger dead could be identified by their bloused boots. United States Army Paratroopers and the 116th Infantry Regiment joined the 2nd Rangers in the coming days. 2nd Rangers took heavy casualties to silence the guns; while movies like the Longest Day (1960) incorrectly purport the operation was in vain because the guns weren’t in place, they were actually 1 kilometer (3,200 feet) inland; Rangers led by 2nd Lieutenant Leonard G. “Bud” Lomell (January 22, 1920 – March 1, 2011) destroyed the guns within sight of a German unit as their commander addressed the formation. In a small notebook stained with the waters of the English Channel the 2nd Ranger Battalion’s S-1 (personnel officer), Captain Richard P. Merrill (December 14, 1919 – March 19, 2005), wrote down the numbers he would later report to Colonel James E. Rudder (May 6, 1910 – March 23, 1970), commander of 2nd Rangers. The battalion had landed with 512 enlisted men and 33 officers. Preliminary casualties numbered 247 enlisted men and 16 officers, of which 65 men and 5 officers had been killed in action, a 48% casualty rate overall, and a 14 percent death rate. At Pointe du Hoc the Ranger dead were laid beside a road for identification. The Ranger corpses, their death masks the color of gray clay, their mouths often frozen in rictus grins, were laid out in respectful rows along the edge of the coastal highway. They awaited formal identification by the officers and enlisted men from the United States Army’s Graves Registration service who were already combing the landing sectors, lifting fingerprints, and searching shredded uniforms for laundry marks. Lomell would later remark how “hard it was to look on the still bodies of buddies, sand and dust drifting across their faces.” Medics Technician 5th Grade Willie Clark (March 17, 1920 – February 16, 1992) and Technician 4th Class Frank E. South (September 20, 1924 – March 4, 2013) noted the skin of the American dead had a yellowish cast, possibly because of the yellow smoke marking rounds fired by naval guns. Photographer’s Mate 3rd Class S. Scott Wigle (September 21, 1907 – February 1981) was a former Detroit Times reporter who took up photojournalism for the Coast Guard during the war. His photo of landing craft leaving England for Normandy was the 1st photo transmitted by wire to the United States. He later sold his Speedgraphic camera for $8.5 1,000,000 in war bonds. He told the Detroit Free Press in 1969 that unburied corpses were visible out of frame in this shot. “I was scared,” Wigle said of seeing combat on D-Day. “But not as scared as when I covered the race riots for The Detroit Times.” Despite the commitment of vast numbers of men and staggering quantities of material, the success of the invasion of Europe depended upon the relatively small number of men who made the initial landings at Pointe du Hoc. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0429.jpg |
| Image Size | 889.70 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 2932 x 2373 |
| Photographer | S. Scott Wigle |
| Photographer Title | United States Coast Guard |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | June 18, 1944 |
| Location | |
| City | Pointe du Hoc |
| State or Province | Normandy |
| Country | France |
| Archive | National Archives and Records Administration |
| Record Number | NWDNS-26-G-2441 |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
Author of the World War II Multimedia Database