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oh, i *think* there is great story re: some troops finding the point du hoc guns amongst the hedges.
yup::::
Away from the Pointe, Rangers were patrolling, fighting when necessary and following any suspicious tracks. At one point a group of around eleven Rangers dropped back to allow a large convoy of armoured Germans to pass uncontested: they simply couldn't attack over 50 enemy troops when the primary objective wasn’t complete and the Germans were heading elsewhere. Having destroyed some telegraph poles on the coastal road, Sergeants Leonard Lomell and Jack Kuhn followed a dirt road inland and made a discovery. There, hidden beneath a swathe of camouflage netting which rendered them invisible to Allied spotting planes, were the five guns, laid out and ready to fire upon Utah beach once the Pointe's spotting point had been re-established. In a later interview, Lomell recounted what happened next:
"There was nobody at the emplacement. We looked around cautiously and over about a hundred yards away in a corner of a field was a vehicle with what looked like an officer talking to his men. We decided let’s take a chance. I said "Jack, you cover me and I’m going in there and destroy them." All I had was two thermite grenades – his and mine. I went in and put the thermite grenades in the traversing mechanism and that knocked two of them out because that melted their gears in a moment. Then I broke their sights. We ran back to the road...and got all the other thermites from the remainder of my guys manning the roadblock and rushed back and put the grenades in traversing mechanisms, elevation mechanisms, and banged the sights. There was no noise to that. There is no noise to a thermite, so no one saw us." (Leonard Lomell, cited in Remembering D-Day, Personal Histories of Everyday Heroes by Martin Bowman, (HarperCollins 2004), pg. 69. )
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