Military History | Pointe du Hoc — The Battery Was Not on the Point

The plan gave the battery six 155 mm guns of French manufacture on a cliff between Omaha and Utah, four in open pits and two under concrete. Companies D, E and F of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, under Lieutenant Colonel James Rudder, were to land at 0630 and take it. The guide craft mistook Pointe de la Percée for the objective, and the column had to run west along the coast to correct, touching down around 0710. The US Army's own history is blunt about the cost: naval fire had already lifted, and the position had forty minutes to recover.

The Rangers climbed and found the emplacements empty. The open pits were pulverised and the casemates damaged, with, in the official history's words, no sign of the guns or of artillery equipment. Around 0900, First Sergeant Leonard Lomell and Staff Sergeant Jack Kuhn walked up a hedgerowed lane about 250 yards south of the coast road and found five of the guns standing in battery, laid toward Utah, ammunition stacked ready, and nobody with them. They were put out of action with thermite grenades. Why they had been left unmanned, the Army history says, is still a mystery. No German account of the battery's own decisions appears anywhere in the American record.

The much-quoted pairing — 225 landed, 90 left after two days — compresses what happened. The 90 is the official history's figure for 7 June, before a craft came in that afternoon with ammunition and a platoon of reinforcements; relief reached the point on 8 June.

The Conservatoire du littoral owns the ground, and the American Battle Monuments Commission has maintained it since January 1979. The cliff is retreating. On 17 June 2026 the granite dagger was craned off the observation bunker and put into storage for re-erection inland, and the visitor centre is closed until the works finish. Admission is free, and the marked path is the only ground to walk.

📸 Cover: bomb craters at Pointe du Hoc, photograph by Jebulon, 30 April 2015, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons.