The rope was slick with blood and seawater, and Lieutenant Colonel James Earl Rudder's hands were burning.

The Assault on Pointe du Hoc: When Rangers Scaled the Impossible Cliffs

225 Men, 100-Foot Cliffs, and the Guns That Weren't There

225 Rangers scaled impossible cliffs on D-Day, then held against German counterattacks for three days until only 90 could still fight.

The rope was slick with blood and seawater, and Lieutenant Colonel James Earl Rudder's hands were burning. Below him, the English Channel churned gray and violent against the jagged Norman cliffs. Above, German grenades tumbled down like deadly hailstones, exploding against the rock face and shredding men who'd made it halfway up. It was 7:10 a.m. on June 8, 1944—two days after the initial D-Day landings—and the survivors of the 2nd Ranger Battalion were still fighting for a narrow strip of cratered moonscape that intelligence had promised held the deadliest guns on the invasion coast.

The original assault had come on D-Day itself, but the Rangers' ordeal at Pointe du Hoc stretched across three brutal days. By June 8, Rudder's force had been whittled from 225 men to barely 90 who could still hold a rifle. They'd scaled the 100-foot cliffs using rocket-fired grappling hooks and extension ladders borrowed from London fire brigades, only to discover that the massive 155mm guns—capable of raking both Utah and Omaha beaches with devastating fire—had been moved inland. The Rangers found them, camouflaged in an orchard, and destroyed them with thermite grenades. But the Germans wanted th…

💡 The Rangers' grappling hooks were so waterlogged from the rough Channel crossing that many rockets couldn't lift the ropes high enough, forcing some men to free-climb the cliffs under fire.