D-Day 2024. We Must Never Forget What They Did.

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  Despite the problems, most transports arrived at the rendezvous point as scheduled at 0330, some 11 miles from the Normandy coast. The Gap Assault Team members straightened up, donned their 40-pound haversacks bulging with charges, slung their carbines wrapped in clear plyo film, shook hands with the Army tankers, and wished them luck, and, in pitch-black darkness, clambered down the cargo nets into their bobbing landing crafts. For two more hours they waited, crammed on top of one another, while the landing craft

• 0:40Jocko Willink?

  turned endless circles, like so many diesel-churning sharks. Before long, the smell of exhaust adjoined with the 4- to 6-foot chop to kindle a seven-bag case of vomiting so bad that many men lost their fear of landing. When the boats stopped circling, it was time. The date was June 6, 1944. As the first wave of landing craft turned south to close the final leg to Omaha Beach, the men who rowed them could see nothing of what lay ahead, except the wave crest that

• 1:23Jocko Willink?

  the crosswinds was whipping into white curls. Suspended in darkness and diesel thrum, this lull was finally interrupted at 0530 with the opening scream of a rocket salvo to their rear that sent a flinch through every closed-shouldered rank, snapping heads from hypnosis and eyes skyward to watch the suddenly visible cloud gray ripple with glowing red strips. A moment later explosions like heat lightning could be seen against the mist-draped hills before them. Seconds after this, the unseen thunder roar of 10,000 airplane engines shrank every helmet

• 2:05Jocko Willink?

  beneath them into its corresponding collarbone and lifted every eye to the still-distant shore and the promised light splash of bombs.

• 2:16Jocko Willink?

  At the wall of assembled battleships now lined up parallel to the beaches, the armada of the landing craft slid through the gaps. Among these was Boat Team Eight, which passed just under the prow of the USS Texas, as its first broadside of 10 14-inch guns erupted in satanic tongues of red flame and smoke so black that it turned the night into a mine explosion, a blast so powerful to the passersby that it jolted away any remnants of nausea and, in the words of Lieutenant Wes Ross, "Would have blown the helmet off my head if the chin strap had not been fastened."

• 3:00Jocko Willink?

  As they motored toward the beach, Boat Team Twelve approached a floating tank, its entire crew huddled on the turret, waving and yelling frantically as their improbable vessel sank beneath them. His boat crammed with men and explosives, the team's coxswain shrugged and motored on toward the black shore.

• 3:26Jocko Willink?

  There was nothing else to be done.

• 3:31Jocko Willink?

  At 0633, precisely three minutes after H-hour and right on schedule, Boat One's ramp splashed down. In a scramble of clomping boots, Gap Assault Team One plunged up to their chest into a 54-degree surf, too filled with fear and adrenaline to notice the cold. Remarkably, no one was shooting. Looking to the right as he waited to shore, Chief Petty Officer Bill Freeman, now in command of NCDU 11, the only enlisted man so entrusted, could see the cliffs of Point du Hock where the second Rangers were already supposed to be ascending. No matter, to his front, where the tanks and infantry and Rangers were already supposed

• 4:16Jocko Willink?

  to be barreling ahead, there was no one. Neither was there a single crater, a single wrecked obstacle, or any sign of Hall's promised bombardment.

• 4:29Jocko Willink?

  Before him lay Rommel's perfect forest of deterrence. Belgian gates, stakes, ramps, hedgehogs, all untouched. Born and raised in Chicago, already tested and hardened in Morocco, and now as skeptical of assurances from superiors as he was of those by Bible-thumping chaplains, Freeman waited for no officer and led his men forward, his thighs lunging out of the water, the bone-chilling waves shoving him shoreward. For reasons unknown to all in the first wave, the enemy was holding his fire.

• 5:11Jocko Willink?

  As Freeman made the most of this lull to hustle to the shore, so too did everyone else, including his army superior, Lieutenant Bill Cahaly, who wasted no time and pointed his engineers toward the first belt of obstacles, a line of Belgian gates not yet covered by the waves. After sprinting upright through the damp sand to reach them, Cahaly and his soldiers used frantic fingers to strap each one with sixteen strategically-placed charges. Running past these, Freeman and his demolition ears were equally exposed and did not stop

• 5:49Jocko Willink?

  until surrounded by the second belt, a mine-barnacled thicket of wooden stakes and log ramps, all of which they immediately started to wrap with haversacks. Left behind in this rush were Seaman Farrell and Conti, two of the boot camp graduates who were straining against bowlines, trying to drag their rubber boat through the surf, the only cover around them a four-hundred-pound pile of explosives.

• 6:20Jocko Willink?

  Through all of this, the only sound to muffle their voices were the guns out to sea and the gentle rhythm of the waves crashing behind them. It was, for those few tense moments, not at all the kind of battlefield for which Kaufman's Hell Week had prepared them. Then...

• 6:40Jocko Willink?

  It was.

• 6:42Jocko Willink?

  First, an MG42 machine gun started barking in the hills, then another, their bullets stitching across the sand, splintering the wooden stakes. Mortars followed, slamming into earth and surf and splashing hot shards of metal in every direction. Next came the dreaded 88s, anti-aircraft guns used by Rommel as beach artillery, the shells exploding plumes of sand and water in terrible groups of three.

• 7:15Jocko Willink?

  First of Gap Assault Team One to be hit was the boat, through the rubber skin, buckling it into the waves with all the extra charges. Beneath the whip and snap of machine gun fire, Seaman Farrell and Conti frantically grabbed what they could, the beach markers, then turned and ran toward the shingle. As they did, Farrell was shot through the knee and Conti through the back. Immediately, an army medic rushed to their aid, dragged them from the surf, tucked them behind the stakes, and then dropped dead from a sniper's bullet.

• 7:50Jocko Willink?

  Gunner's mate Second Class Ozzy Mingledorf, a Fort Pierce graduate from Douglas, Georgia, who had valiantly left a sick bed just two days before so as to not miss this invasion, strapped his charges to the wood pilings just as he had in all those months of training. As he did, a bullet slammed into his leg.

• 8:13Jocko Willink?

  As the demolition ears crawled and sprinted between posts, Freeman dashed around them all, paying out his telephone reel of yellow primer cord and connecting the charges into a single trunk line. Then, better late than never, the first Sherman tank trundled out of the surf, the sea draining off the beast in waterfalls. As it shook free of its flotation skirt, it turned parallel to the shingle, firing toward the enemy. With every round, it drew attention away from Freeman and his men. When it turned back, threatening to overrun and cut his trunk line, Freeman sprinted from cover, waved his arms like mad, and cursed the tankers

• 8:58Jocko Willink?

  until they went around it.

• 9:02Jocko Willink?

  Less than twenty minutes after the landing, the Team One engineers were ready to blow the gates. Gripping the waterproofed fuse lighter, Lieutenant Cahaly sucked the smoke-filled air into his lungs and yelled, "Fire in the hole!"

• 9:19Jocko Willink?

  In the same breath, he pulled the fuse, dropped it, and ran, tossing a purple smoke grenade as he went. Freeman and his sailors saw the signal and pressed their bellies into the sand.

• 9:33Jocko Willink?

  As soon as the gates exploded and flattened beneath the waves, the landing craft flooded past. Rushing down their ramps, infantrymen fell back at the sight of mortars and artillery bursts and instinctively crouched forward against the machine gun bullets now drumming into the wooden posts and human flesh.

• 9:55Jocko Willink?

  As if caught in a hurricane, soldiers huddled next to the only cover available, falling in behind log ramps and stake posts. Around them, the demolition ears inspired opened-mouthed expressions of amazement as they shinied up the stakes and stood on each other's shoulders to crown each mine with a charge to ensure that it blew apart at the same moment the pole did.

• 10:25Jocko Willink?

  With terrified soldiers frozen in place, neither advancing nor retreating, Freeman and Cahaly sprinted between posts, yelling obscenities and kicking the infantrymen away.

• 10:39Jocko Willink?

  Once clear, Freeman gave the signal, tossed a purple smoke grenade, and Petty Officer Bass pulled the fuse. Fire in the hole! At 0655, only 22 minutes after landing, the whole area exploded in a roar that drowned out the battle's din, shooting skyward a hell's mixture of water, smoke, wood, sand, and steel, high into the air.

• 11:08Jocko Willink?

  The defenders' response was vicious. As soon as the smoke and debris settled, the fire from the hills became unbearable. As Mingledorf, the Georgian with a hole in his leg, crawled hand over hand to the seawall and safety, a round slammed through his helmet into his forehead, killing him instantly.

• 11:33Jocko Willink?

  With the obstacles blown and all the beach cover gone, Petty Officer Bass, a former Seabee from Durham, North Carolina, resisted the urge to run and instead found Seaman Farrell alone, still writhing from the hole in his knee and with a fresh wound to his right eye.

• 11:51Jocko Willink?

  Bass bent down to cradle the boy to cover him, and as he did, a bullet tore through his back, entering just to the right of his spine and blowing a hole out of his right shoulder.

• 12:04Jocko Willink?

  Sergeant Murphy, one of the Army's naval augmentees, found them both and dragged them to the seawall.

• 12:14Jocko Willink?

  Wounded himself, and with nearly everyone in his crew either shot or dead, Freeman was unstoppable. Blasting obstacles, clearing out infantrymen before his charges blew, helping his wounded to cover.

• 12:33Jocko Willink?

  Though they had been cut to shreds, Gap Assault Team 1 had completed its mission.

• 12:41Jocko Willink?

  Their 50-yard gap was clear.

• 12:51Jocko Willink?

  And that was an excerpt about one small part of D-Day from the book By Water Beneath the Walls, written by Benjamin H. Milligan. And it explains in great detail the history of the Navy SEALs, where we came from and why.

• 13:20Jocko Willink?

  And he exhaustively researched his book from now unclassified archives and records, documents in personal and family collections and articles and interviews,

• 13:36Jocko Willink?

  all during countless hours in government and public and private library halls in order for him to capture and understand and explain the history of our heritage in the SEAL teams.

• 13:53Jocko Willink?

  And being a SEAL himself, Ben was committed to accurately and methodically chronicle our lineage.

• 14:03Jocko Willink?

  And there's perhaps no more seminal moment for the frogmen of the United States Navy, the forefathers of the SEAL teams, than D-Day, June 6, 1944.

• 14:21Jocko Willink?

  The mission was treacherous. They were exposed. It was chaotic and unpredictable.

• 14:30Jocko Willink?

  But they got the job done.

• 14:34Jocko Willink?

  Gap Assault Team won and the rest of the teams cleared enough of the beach. They opened enough gaps in the formidable Nazi defenses to allow a beachhead to be captured

• 14:47Jocko Willink?

  and the rest of the campaign for Europe to commence.

• 14:53Jocko Willink?

  And in doing so,

• 14:56Jocko Willink?

  of the 190 men from the Navy Combat Demolition Unit that participated in the assault on Omaha Beach, 65 were wounded and 32 were killed.

• 15:11Jocko Willink?

  A casualty rate of over 50%.

• 15:16Jocko Willink?

  And by midnight on June 6th, D-Day, thousands of other Americans and Allied servicemen had given their last full measure.

• 15:31Jocko Willink?

  But the fight continued. And ultimately, hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines would die in this war.

• 15:44Jocko Willink?

  And they did this.

• 15:47Jocko Willink?

  They made these sacrifices

• 15:51Jocko Willink?

  to stop the Nazis

• 15:55Jocko Willink?

  and to free the world from darkness and tyranny.

• 16:03Jocko Willink?

  We must never forget what they did

• 16:07Jocko Willink?

  and the sacrifice they made for us

• 16:12Jocko Willink?

  to protect our unalienable rights of life, liberty,

• 16:20Jocko Willink?

  and the pursuit of happiness.

• 16:25Jocko Willink?

  We will remember them.