"THE GATES OF HELL"
By Greg Edwards & Mark Morrison
The Roanoke Times
June 4, 1994
Sergeant Murphy Scott remembered a radio broadcast back in England when Axis Sal a German propagandist who played popular music and tried to demoralize the troops, warned that "the gates of Hell" would open when the Allied armies landed in France.
How did Sal know?
On D-Day Scott was the leader of a mortar squad in the 116th Infantry Regiment's Company H, which had been based in Martinsville when the regiment was a National Guard outfit before the war. The mission of the mortar and machine-gun company was to follow directly behind and back up Company G, of Farmville, a company of riflemen that was to land with the first wave of assault forces on a stretch of Omaha Beach, code-named Dog White, just east of Vierville.
With strong Channel tides and the confusion of battle causing other boats to land thousands of yards east of their targets, Scott's boat landed where it was supposed to "by accident."
When the Navy coxswain at the helm neared the shore, the boat struck a sandbar. He backed off and headed west. "He found an opening and he gunned that thing wide open." Scott recalled. "When the ramp went down, the boat sank."
It was 10 minutes to seven. Scott, 24, a former high-school athlete who had grown up on a dairy farm in Vinton and had worked at a furniture factory in Martinsville, was knocking on gates of Hell.
We got out in water that was waist deep on me," said the 5-9 Scott. "When we cleared the water, we hit the ground because they were firing small arms fire, not at us but in front of us."
Scott told his squad to get behind a burned-out tank on the beach. The tanks had been sent ahead of the infantry to cover their landing, but many sank on the way in. Those who made it fared no better than men on foot.
From behind the tank, Scott watched a machine gun squad that had stayed too long on the beach come under German fire. About half were killed or wounded. One squad leader was killed by one of the many land mines that littered the shore.
Another tank to the left of Scott and his squad had been knocked out, too. As for other American troops, "there wasn't too many of anybody right then tell you the truth. There was several dead and wounded."
The day before, Scott and others had looked at aerial photographs of German trenches and pillboxes that were being built behind the seawall that ran parallel along the western side of Omaha Beach. Scott and his men ran for the wall and crossed to the relative safety of the finished German fortifications. more...
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