The 175th Infantry Regiment crosses Vierville
en route to Gruchy and La Cambe
The movements of 7 June 
(details) General Gerhardt's PC in the career of Vierville (right in the descent). A brief thread hung with 2 air-sleeve tanks delimits the zone where the cards are (left) and which must not be approached.
(details) The castle of Gruchy
Beyond Vierville, a French woman with her little daughter spoke to Captain Miller (maybe it was Madame de Loÿs)"The Boches! The Boches!" explained the woman, making a sign to Miller to follow her. Miller took with him some men and carefully followed the woman beyond a large castle (Gruchy?) and up to a small ravine. The Americans have heard complaints in German from a tunnel hidden at the bottom of the ravine. Miller and two men jumped in, their guns ready. They shouted at the tunnel entrance: "Achtung!, Raus! Raus!" Again complaints. Miller and his men slowly entered the tunnel, turned a corner, and found themselves in a large underground room, face to face with a German nurse. Crying "Kamerad! Kamerad!" the Germans raised their arms in the air. Several wounded were lying there. Apparently the place must have been a PC. As the German defences collapsed, the staff had had to leave quickly, leaving the wounded untransportable behind.
"General Gerhardt, sitting on a crate of C rations, early on the morning of June 7 in Vierville's career, was thinking about his next movements. He had received shortly before dawn his first official order from General Gerow, CD. the Vth Corps, (installed, he, at the Ruquet), quickly go take Isigny.
"He wanted to allow the 115th and especially the 116th Regiment to reorganize themselves after their fighting, dispersal and loss the day before. So he decided to use his only fresh regiment, the 175th, currently a "floating reserve" of the Vth Corps offshore.
"He agreed with Gerow to start the landing at 12:00 on Vierville Beach, Dog Green. The order was given at 11:46 a.m. to Colonel Goode of the 175th.
"It was quite simple to launch this order at Goode, but it was much more difficult for Goode to pass it to his Bataillon and Company Chiefs scattered on their offshore transports.
"In fact, the zon of anchorages in front of Omaha, with its mix of warships and Landing Craft was as paddling as the beach. First, since the day before, the ships had come as close as possible to the coast and the beautiful order of the previous day, 11 miles offshore, had disappeared. Then each of the 12 companies in the Regiment were loaded on different transports. Small stars of the USNavy have therefore travelled the Armada screaming in their voice carriers: "All elements of the 175th are expected urgently on the beach!"
"Even after the order was passed to all units, many had to wait for the Navy to gather enough LCVP and LCA to take them to the beach. Time was still needed for men to descend there with nets thrown along the hulls of the transports. As a result, the 175th arrived on the beach in small packages.
"And it was then that Gerhardt discovered with indignation where the 175th had been landed. He had wanted the Regiment to land on Omaha Beach's west flank in Vierville, so that he could quickly leave for Isigny. But the Navy had considered landing in front of Vierville to be too dangerous, especially at high tide, because of the obstacles still being removed on the beach. The 175th had therefore been directed to St-Laurent, 3 km further east. Later, Gerhardt complained: "The regiment was landed too far east, which required a long lateral movement. Given the constraints on the ground troops, this delay could have been costly."
"After landing, the 175th was immediately directed to the valley of Vierville. "The 175th marched in loose formation on the beach and was targeted by snipers," recalls J. Milnor Roberts, aide-de-camp from Gerow. "But much worse, the soldiers were walking in the middle of the bodies of the guys who had been killed the day before, and these guys were wearing the 29th. The youths thus walked among the corpses of their comrades. By the time they arrived in Vierville, they were upset."
Captain Miller drove Company F/175 (less one of its mysteriously disappeared sections) west at the foot of the cliffs. Captain Jimmy Hays of Regimental HQ saw Miller and warned him: "Everything is changed. Colonel Goode was right. You can forget the original plans. We have to go to Gruchy, there on the map," Hays showed."Tomorrow we will go to Isigny, more west." Miller had never heard of Isigny, according to the first plans, the F/175 had to go straight to the South leaving Omaha.
Company C/175, it never received the counter-order and went south to find out later that the rest of the Regiment was elsewhere. The company fought with the 115th for 3 days before joining the 175th.
The 175th finally reached on foot the beach of Vierville, where he mixed in the afternoon with a large influx of troops and vehicles pressing in the climb.
"There was a stopper as can be seen at the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway" (in New York) remembers Slingluff, "the bumper against bumper vehicles (those of 175th and those of 110th Artillery Battalion, and others), the tanks (those of 747th Tank Battalion, reinforcements and replacements of 743rd), the infantry in the middle (of 175th in particular), and of time to time a 88mm shell falling".
On the way up the valley of Vierville, the men of the 175th passed the Spartan PC of the 29th division. "The zon had been isolated by cords so that no one could approach the operating charts," recalls Lieutenant Sam Allsup, section head of Company A/175, "It looked like a huge organized confusion, and all the division's operations were directed from behind a pile of ruins."
At the top of the valley, the men of the 175th changed course westward to exit Vierville. It was at sunset (22:00); as the sky was darkening, the regiment walked another 2 km and turned south to the small hamlet of Gruchy. They had a short moment of rest before returning to Isigny, via La Cambe, on a night march.