Already shot in the side, he climbed a 100-foot cliff on D-Day, hunted down five enemy guns the Germans had hidden inland, and destroyed them almost single-handedly with grenades and the butt of his rifle.
Those guns could have killed thousands on the beaches.
A historian called him the most important American on D-Day after Eisenhower.
This is the story of Bud Lomell..🧵1/6
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Leonard Lomell, known as Bud, was a 24-year-old First Sergeant in Company D of the 2nd Ranger Battalion. He had grown up in New Jersey, worked as a freight train brakeman, and volunteered for the Rangers, the toughest and most demanding unit the Army had.
His battalion was handed one of the most dangerous assignments of the entire invasion.
A few miles west of Omaha Beach stood a cliff called Pointe du Hoc. On top of it, the Germans had built a battery of five massive 155 millimeter coastal guns. From that height, those guns could reach both Omaha and Utah beaches, and the fleet of ships in the Channel between them. If they opened fire on the morning of June 6, they could slaughter thousands of American soldiers as they came ashore.
The Rangers were given a simple, almost suicidal task. Climb the 100-foot cliff, and destroy the guns.
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Everything went wrong from the start.
The landing craft were pushed off course and arrived around 35 minutes late, with the German defenders fully alert and waiting. As Lomell came off his boat, before he had even reached dry land, a machine gun bullet tore into his side.
He kept going.
Wounded, he and his men reached the base of the cliff and began to climb. The Rangers went up hand over hand, using ropes and ladders, while the Germans above them fired down and cut the ropes and threw grenades. Men were hit and fell. But the Rangers kept climbing, and Bud Lomell, bleeding from his wound, hauled himself to the top.
Then came the moment that should have ruined everything. The Rangers fought their way to the gun emplacements they had crossed an ocean and climbed a cliff to destroy.
The guns were not there.
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The Germans had moved them.
Knowing the position was a target, they had pulled the five big guns back and hidden them, leaving telephone poles sticking out of the emplacements to fool Allied aerial reconnaissance into thinking the guns were still in place. From the air, the decoys had worked perfectly.
But the guns had to be somewhere, and they were still a deadly threat. So Lomell and a handful of Rangers pushed inland to find them.
About 1,200 yards from the cliff, down a sunken country lane, Lomell and his platoon sergeant, Jack Kuhn, found them. Five enormous 155 millimeter guns, sitting in an orchard under camouflage netting, fully loaded, aimed directly at Utah Beach. They were ready to fire. And there were dozens of German troops gathered nearby, in a field at the edge of the orchard.
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What Lomell did next is the reason his name should be remembered.
He told Kuhn to cover him. Then, already wounded, he crept forward alone into the orchard, right up to the guns, with enemy soldiers a short distance away.
He had thermite grenades, incendiary devices that burn at a temperature high enough to melt metal. He placed them on the guns and set them off, melting the traversing and elevation mechanisms so the guns could never be aimed or fired again. He smashed the gunsights with the butt of his Thompson submachine gun. Working fast and quietly so the nearby Germans would not realize what was happening, he disabled gun after gun.
When he ran out of grenades, he and Kuhn crept back to their men, gathered up every thermite grenade the other Rangers had, and Lomell went back in a second time to finish the rest.
By the time he was done, all five guns were destroyed. They never fired a single shot at the beaches.
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The Rangers completed their mission before nine o'clock that morning. But the cost was terrible. Of the 225 Rangers who had landed at Pointe du Hoc, only about 90 were still standing by the end of the fighting.
Six months later, in the frozen hell of the Hürtgen Forest, Lomell led the capture and defense of a critical hilltop known as Hill 400, was wounded again, and earned the Silver Star. He finished the war as one of the most decorated Rangers in the Army, with the Distinguished Service Cross, the British Military Medal, and the French Legion of Honor among his decorations.
The historian Stephen Ambrose later wrote that, other than General Eisenhower himself, no single American did more to make D-Day a success than Bud Lomell.
And almost no one knew it. Lomell came home, went to law school, and became a quiet, respected lawyer in New Jersey. He rarely spoke about the war. For years, even his own law partners had no idea that the modest man in the next office had climbed a cliff under fire and saved thousands of lives on the most important day of the 20th century.
This was the story of Bud Lomell.
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