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No matter what, the rangers would try to climb the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc in the opening moments of D-Day.
On the evening of June 5, 1944, aboard the transport New Amsterdam, anchored off Weymouth, England, U.S. Army lieutenant George Kerchner of the 2nd Ranger Battalion was censoring his platoon's mail. Every man seemed to have written a long letter home-and no surprise, with the rangers committed to one of the most hazardous missions of the war.
Colonel James E. Rudder, battalion commander, had laid out the harsh facts when he briefed the officers, "All we have to do is get onto this little gravel beach across rough water, under fire from concealed gun emplacements-and we're the one target in the area." Rudder, a 34-year-old rancher from Brady, Texas, continued: "Then we have to get through mines, climb a 123-foot cliff held by a strong enemy garrison, knock out the big guns they got emplaced up there. That cliff wall faces in three directions-seaward and to the right and left-with an unrestricted field of fire on the invasion landings at Omaha and Utah beaches, only a few miles up and down the coast.
"Then after we do all that, we have to hold the position against any counterattacks from the landward side that slopes to a gentle plain. And we got a big 30 minutes to do it. If we don't pull it off in that time, we endanger the invasion troops, we lose our own backup force and we're on our own."
Operation Overlord loomed as Kerchner went back to the mail. A letter written by Staff Sgt. Larry Johnson couldn't be mailed after D-Day along with the rest. Johnson had written a girl asking for a date early in June. She lived in Paris. It struck Kerchner that as long as there were optimists like the sergeant, nothing was impossible, not even survival in this crazy mission.
At 10:15 p.m., June 5, a BBC broadcast to the French underground was intercepted by counterintelligence of the German Fifteenth Army: "Wound my heart with a monotonous languor"-a line from the French poet Paul Verlaine. The first line of the poem had been intercepted by the Germans the previous morning. This message, they knew,...