Command pulled no punches it was to be a suicide mission. Soon it distinguished itself in the landings at Arzew, Algeria, Gela, Sicily, and Salerno, Italy.īased on its success, the 531st was assigned the task of being among the first to hit the beaches on D-Day, clearing a path for the invasion. The product of the Army’s need for a quick-strike amphibious force to spearhead landings in Europe and the Pacific, the unit had formed in May 1942 and shipped to England in August. Rencher was assigned to the 531st Amphibious Engineer Battalion, part of the First Engineer Special Brigade, a unit that had led every major water invasion in the European Theater in World War II. Upon arrival in England, he found the Army had different plans. I thought it would be a wonderful way to fight a war.” “I figured I’d be sitting in England surveying airports and roads,” he remembers. Later, when he arrived at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, he impressed his trainers by getting the highest marksman score of any soldier up to that time, 248 out of 250.ĭue to his experience in high school on a survey crew, he was assigned to the army combat engineers and shipped to England in 1943. Bullets were 50 cents a box, almost a full day’s wage, and he learned never to waste one. At 14, his father charged him with killing the jackrabbits that raided the family alfalfa crop. “A Wonderful Way to Fight a War” for an Army Combat Engineerīorn in 1924 into a farm family in Snowflake, Arizona, Rencher grew up with a rifle in his hand. But it was getting light, and it was only a matter of time before the men would be detected. He glanced at the German sentries on the beach, but they remained impassive and unaware. He had gone 20 feet when the cable blew, the water muting the blast. Touching the flame to the fuse, gratified to see it sparking, he swam away as fast as he could. He had already wrapped plastic explosives around the cable, attaching a cap and a five-foot fuse. He surfaced, flicked the flint on his Bic lighter, and dove under again. Groping semi-blind in the murky waves, Rencher located the heavy two-inch-thick steel underwater cable strung to prevent amphibious landings. Rencher’s team was in the Tare Green Beach sector of Utah Beach, near the Normandy town of St. The squads’ failure to clear the area could quickly turn the D-Day landings into a bloody and tragic debacle. They had also been told that within two hours most of them would be dead, mowed down clearing the sea approaches, the beaches, and the minefields beyond, which had been strewn with millions of mines. They had been told that the success of the invasion hinged in large part on their carefully timed work over the next few hours. First Army’s First Engineer Special Brigade, 531st Amphibious Regiment were in the vanguard of the greatest amphibious invasion in the history of the world. The date was June 6, 1944, and Rencher and his fellow demolitions experts with the U.S. In the distance, he listened to the waves breaking against the rocky shore. It was a little after 5 am, eerily quiet as the darkness began to yield to the pale dawn. Struggling through neck-high water, swallowed by five-foot swells every few moments, Rencher prayed he would not step in a hole and disappear forever, weighed down by his clothing and equipment. Minutes earlier, his three-man team had slipped stealthily from a pitching landing craft into the frigid waters of the English Channel, each man burdened with a full pack, rifle, extra clips of ammunition, blasting caps, and 60 pounds of explosives. Nineteen-year-old army combat engineer Jay Rencher blinked the salt spray from his eyes, filled his lungs, and again plunged beneath the cold, roiling waves. By Rob Morris Nineteen-year-old Jay Rencher, member of the First Engineer Special Brigade, 531st Amphibious Regiment, cleared obstacles from Utah Beach on D-Day.
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