Bob, since you mentioned the D-Day anniversary, I thought it would be interesting to post a report about a "climb" that occured on that day:
"It was a wild and frenzied scene. Again and again the rockets roared, shooting the ropes and rope ladders with grapnels attached(up the 100 ft. cliff of Pointe Du Hoc). Shells and 40-millimeter machine guns raked the cliff top, shaking down great chunks of earth on the Rangers. Men spurted across the narrow, cratered beach trailing scaling ladders, ropes and hand rockets. Here and there at the cliff top Germans bobbed up, throwing down "potato masher" hand grenades or fired Schmeissers. Somehow, the Ranger dodged from cover to cover, unloaded their boats and fired up the cliff-all at the same time. And off the Pointe, two DUKW's-amphipbious vehicles-with tall, extended ladders, borrowed for the occasion from the London Fire Brigade, tried to maneuver closer in. From the tops of the ladders Rangers blasted the Headlands wiht Browning automatic rifles and Tommy guns.
The assault was furious. Some men didn't wait for the ropes to catch. Weapons slung over their shoulders, they cut handholds with their knives and started up the nine-story-high cliff like flies. Some of the grapnels now began to acatch and men swarmed up the ropes. Then there wire wild yells as the Germans cut the ropes and Rangers hurtled back down the cliff. PFC Harry Robert's rope was cut twice. On his third try he finally got to a cratered niche just under the edge of the cliff. Sergeant Bil "L-Rod" Petty tried going up hand over hand on a plain rope but, although he was an expert free climber, the rope was so wet and muddy he couldn't make it. Then Petty tried a ladder, got thirty feet up and slid back when it was cut. He started back up again. Sergeant Herman Stein climbing another ladder, was almost pushed off the cliff face when he accidentally inflated his Mae West. He "struggled for an eternity" with the life preserver but there were men ahead and behind him on the ladder. Somehow Stein kept going.
Now men were scrambling up a score of ropes that twisted and snaked down from the top of the cliff. Suddenly Sergeant Petty, on his way up for the third time, was peppered by chunks of earth flying out all around him. The Germans fought desperately, despite the fire that was still raining on them from the Ranger on the fire ladders and from the destroyers offshore. Petty saw a climber next to him stiffen and swing out from the cliff. Stein saw him, too. So did 20 year old PFC Carl Bombardier. As they watched, horrified, the man slid down the rope and fell, bouncing from ledges and rock outcroppings, and it seemed to Petty "a lifetime before his body hit the beach." Petty froze on the rope. He could not make his hand move up to the next rung. He remembers saying to himself, "This is just too hard to climb." But the German machine guns got him going again. As they began to spray the cliff dangerously near him Petty "unfroze real fast." Desperately he hauled himself up the last few yards."
Company C, 2nd Ranger Battalion assault on Pointe Du Hoc, Dog Green Beach, Omaha Beach, Normandy. Quoted from "The Longest Day," by Cornelius Ryan.
As an aside, the opening scene from "Saving Private Ryan" is based on this action.
