Taken from ATB's D-Day. I suspect some are accounts from further publications but thought they give a good idea for those who are interested or researching.
FIRST WAVE AT OMAHA BEACH Able Company of the 116th Infantry of the 29th Division, riding the tide in seven Higgins boats, is still 5,000 yards from the beach when first taken under artillery fire. The shells fall short. At 1,000 yards, Boat No.5 is hit dead on and flounders. Six men drown before help arrives. Second Lieutenant Edward Gearing and 20 others paddle around until picked up by naval craft, thereby missing the fight at the shore line. It’s their lucky day. The other six boats ride unscathed to within 100 yards of the shore, where a shell into Boat No.3 kills two men. Another dozen drown, taking to the water as the boat sinks. That leaves five boats. Lieutenant Edward Tidrick in Boat No.2 cries out: ‘My God, we’re coming to the right spot, but look at it! No shingle, no wall, no shell holes, no cover. Nothing!’ His men are at the sides of the boat, straining for a view of the target. They stare but say nothing. At exactly 6.36 am, ramps are dropped along the boat line and the men jump off into the water anywhere from waist deep to higher than a man’s head. This is the signal awaited by the Germans atop the bluff. Already pounded by mortars, the floundering line is instantly swept by crossing machine gun fires from both ends of the beach. Able Company has planned to wade ashore in three files from each boat, centre file going first, then flank files peeling off to right and left. The first men try to do this but are ripped apart before they can make five yards. Even the lightly wounded die by drowning, doomed by the water logging of their overloaded packs. From boat No.1, all hands jump off into water over their heads. Most of them are carried down. Ten or so survivors get around the boat and clutch at its sides in an attempt to stay afloat. The same thing happens to the section in Boat No.4. Half of its people are lost to the fire or tide before anyone gets ashore. All order has vanished from Able Company before it has fired a shot. Already the sea runs red. Even among some of the lightly wounded who jump into shallow water, the hits prove fatal. Knocked down by a bullet in the arm or weakened by fear and shock, they are unable to rise again and are drowned by the onrushing tide. Other wounded men drag themselves ashore and, on finding the sands, lie quiet from total exhaustion, only to be overtaken and killed by the water. A few move safely through the bullet swarm to the beach, then find that they cannot hold there. They return to the water to use it as body cover. Faces turned upward, so that their nostrils are out of the water, they creep toward the land at the same rate as the tide. That is how most of the survivors make it. The less rugged or less clever seek the cover of enemy obstacles moored along the upper half of the beach and are knocked off by machine gun fire. Within seven minutes after the ramps drop, Able Company is inert and leaderless. At Boat No.2, Lieutenant Tidrick takes a bullet through the throat as he jumps from the ramp into the water. He staggers onto the sand and flops down ten feet from Private First Class Leo J. Nash. Nash sees the blood spurting and hears the strangled words gasped by Tidrick: ‘Advance with the wire cutters!’ It’s futile; Nash has no cutters. To give the order, Tidrick has raised himself upon his hands and made himself a target for an instant. Nash, burrowing into the sand, sees machine gun bullets rip Tidrick from crown to pelvis. From the cliff above, the German gunners are shooting into the survivors as from a roof top. Captain Taylor N. Fellers and Lieutenant Benjamin R. Kearfoot never make it. They had loaded with a section of 30 men in Boat No.6 (Landing Craft, Assault, No. 1015). But what exactly happened to this boat and its human cargo is never to be known. No one saw the craft go down. How each man aboard it met death remains unreported. Half of the drowned bodies were later found along the beach. It is supposed that the others were claimed by the sea. Along the beach only one Able Company officer still lives-Lieutenant Elijah Nance, who is hit in the heel as he quits the boat and hit in the belly by a second bullet as he makes the sand. By the end of ten minutes, every Sergeant is dead or wounded. To the eyes of such men as Gilbert G. Murdock, this clean sweep suggests that the Germans on the high ground have spotted all leaders and concentrated fire their way. Among the men who are still moving in with the tide, rifles, packs and helmets have already been cast away in the interests of survival. To the right of where Tidrick’s boat is drifting with the tide, its coxswain lying dead next to the shell shattered wheel, the seventh craft, carrying a medical section with one officer and 16 men, noses towards the beach. The ramp drops. In that instant, two machine guns concentrate their fire on the opening. Not a man is given time to jump. All aboard are cut down where they stand. By the end of 15 minutes, Able Company has still not fired a weapon. No orders are being given by anyone. No words are spoken. The few able-bodied survivors move or not as they see fit. Merely to stay alive is a full-time job. The fight has become a rescue operation in which nothing counts but the force of a strong example. Above all others, stands out the first aid man, Thomas Breedin. Reaching the sands, he strips off pack, blouse, helmet and boots. For a moment, he stands there so that others on the strand will see him and get the same idea. Then he crawls into the water to pull in the wounded men about to be overlapped by the tide. The deeper water is still spotted with tide walkers advancing at the same pace as the rising water. But now owing to Breedin’s example, the strongest among them become more conspicuous targets. Coming along, they pick up wounded comrades and float them to the shore raft wise. Machine gun fire still rakes the water. Burst after burst spoils the rescue act, shooting the floating man from the hands of the walker or killing both together. But Breedin for his hour leads a charmed life and stays with his work indomitably. By the end of one half-hour, approximately two-thirds of the company is forever gone. There is no precise casualty figure for that moment. There is for the Normandy landing as a whole no accurate figure for the first hour or first day. The circumstances preclude it. Whether more Able Company riflemen died from water than from fire is only known to heaven. All earthly evidence so indicates, but cannot prove it. By the end of one hour, the survivors from the main body have crawled across the sand to the foot of the bluff, where there is a narrow sanctuary of defiladed space. There, they lie all day, clean spent, unarmed, too shocked to feel hunger, incapable even of talking to one and other. No one happens by to succour them, ask what has happened, provide water, or offer unwanted pity. D-Day at Omaha afforded no time for such missions. Every landing company was overloaded by its own assault problems. By the end of one hour and 45 minutes, six survivors from the boat section on the extreme right shake loose and work their way to a shelf a few rods up the cliff. Four fall exhausted from the short climb and advance no further. They stay there through the day, seeing no one else from the company. The other two Privates Joe Shefer and Thomas Lovejoy, join a group from the 2nd Ranger Battalion, which is assaulting Pointe Du Hoc to the right of the company sector, and fight on with the Rangers throughout the day. Two men, two rifles. Except for these Able Company’s contribution to the D-Day fire-fight is cipher. Baker Company, which is scheduled to land 26 minutes after Able and right on top of it, supporting and reinforcing, has its full load of trouble on the way in. So rough is the sea during the journey that the men have to bail furiously with their helmets to keep the six boats from swamping. Thus preoccupied, they do not see the disaster that is overtaking Able until they are almost atop it. Then, what their eyes behold is either so limited or so staggering to the senses that control withers, the assault wave begins to dissolve, and disunity induced by fear virtually cancels the mission. A great cloud of smoke and dust raised by the mortar and machine gun has almost closed a curtain around Able Company’s ordeal. Outside the pall, nothing is to be seen but a line of corpses adrift, a few heads bobbing in the water and the crimson-running tide. But this is enough for the British coxswains. They raise the cry: ‘We can’t go in there. We can’t see the landmarks. We must pull off.’ In the command boat, Captain Ettore V. Zappacosta pulls a Colt .45 and says: ‘By God you’ll take this boat straight in.’ His display of courage wins obedience, but it’s still a fools order. Such of Baker’s boats as try to go straight in suffer Able’s fate without helping the other company whatever. Thrice during the approach, mortar shells break right next to Zappacosta’s boat but by an irony leave it unscathed, thereby sparing the riders a few more moments of life. At 75 yards from the sand, Zappacosta yells: ‘Drop the ramp!’ The ramp goes down, and a storm of bullet fire comes in. Zappacosta jumps first from the boat, reels ten yards through the elbow high tide, and yells back: ‘I’m hit.’ He staggers on a few more steps. The aid man, Thomas Kenser, see’s him bleeding from hip and shoulder. Kenser yells: ‘Try to make it in; I’m coming.’ But the Captain falls face forward into the wave, and the weight of his equipment and soaked pack pin him to the bottom. Kenser jumps toward him and is shot dead while in the air. Lieutenant Tom Dallas of Charlie Company, who has come along to make a reconnaissance, is the third man. He makes it to the edge of the sand. There, a machine gun burst blows his head apart before he can flatten. Private First Class Robert L. Sales, who is lugging Zappacosta’s radio (an SCR 300), is the fourth man to leave the boat, having waited long enough to see the others die. His boot heel catches on the edge of the ramp and he falls sprawling into the tide, losing the radio but saving his life. Every man that tries to follow him is either killed or wounded before reaching dry land. Sale’s alone gets to the beach un hit. To travel those few yards takes him two hours. First, he crouches in the water, and waddling forward on his haunches just a few paces, collides with a floating log-driftwood. In that moment, a mortar shell explodes just above his head, knocking him groggy. He hugs the log to keep from going down, and somehow the effort seems to clear his head a little. Next thing he knows, one of Able Company’s tide walkers hoists him aboard the log and, using his sheaf knife, cuts away Swale’s pack, boots, and assault jacket. Feeling stronger, Sale’s returns to the water, and from behind the log, using it as cover, pushes toward the sand. Private Mack L. Smith of Baker Company, hit three times in the face, joins him there. An Able Company rifleman named Kemper, hit thrice in the leg, also comes alongside. Together, they follow the log until at last they roll it to the farthest reach of high tide. Then they flatten themselves behind it, staying there for hours after the flow has turned to ebb. The dead of both company’s wash up to where they lie, and then wash back out to sea again. As a body drifts in close to them, Sale’s and companions, disregarding the fire, crawl from behind the log to take a look. If anyone of them recognises the face of a comrade, they join in dragging the body up onto dry sand beyond the waters reach. The unfamiliar dead are left to the sea. So long as the tide is full, they stay at this task. Later, an unidentified first-aid man who comes wiggling along the beach dresses the wounds of Smith. Sale’s, as he finds strength, bandages Kemper. The three remain behind the log until night falls. Only one other Baker Company boat tries to come straight in to the beach. Somehow the boat founders. Somehow all of its people are killed-one British coxswain and 30 American infantrymen. Where they fall, there is no one to take note and report. Frightened coxswains in the other four craft take one quick look, instinctively drawback, and then veer right and left away from the Able Company shambles. So doing, they dodge their duty while giving a break to their passengers. Such is the shock to the boat team leaders, and such their feeling of relief at the turning movement, that not one utters a protest. Lieutenant Leo A. Pingenot’s coxswain swings the boat far rightward toward Pointe Du Hoc; then spying a small and deceptively peaceful-looking cove, heads directly for the land. Fifty yards out, Pingenot yells: ‘Drop the ramp!’ the coxswain freezes on the rope, refusing to lower. Staff Sergeant Odell L. Padgett jumps him, throttles him, and bears him to the floor. Padgett’s men lower the rope and jump for the water. In two minutes they are all up to their necks and struggling to avoid drowning. That quickly, Pingenot is already far out ahead of them. Padgett comes even with him, and together they cross on to dry land. The beach of the cove is heavily strewn with giant boulders. Bullets seem to be pinging off every rock. Pingenot and Padgett dive behind the same rock. Then they glance back, but to their horror see not one person. Quite suddenly, smoke has half blanked out the scene beyond the water’s edge. Pingenot moans: ‘My God, the whole boat team is dead.’ Padgett sings out: ‘Hey, are you hit?’ back come many voices from beyond the smoke. ‘What’s the rush?’ ‘Take it easy!’ ‘We’ll get there.’ ‘Where’s the fire?’ ‘Who wants to know?’ The men are still moving along, using the water as cover. Padgett’s yell is their first information that anyone else has moved up front. They all make it to the shore, and they are 28 strong at first. Pingenot and Padgett manage to stay ahead of them, coaxing and encouraging. Padgett keeps yelling: ‘Come on goddamn it, things are better up there!’ but still they lose two men killed and three wounded in crossing the beach. In the cove the platoon latches on to a company of Rangers, fights all day as part of that company, and helps destroy the enemy entrenchments atop Pointe Du Hoc. By sundown, that mop-up is completed. The platoon bivouacs at the first hedgerow beyond the cliff. Another Baker Company boat, which turns to the right, has far less luck. Staff Sergeant Robert M. Campbell, who leads the section, is the first man to jump out when the ramp goes down. He drops in drowning water, and his load of two Bangalore torpedoes takes him straight to the bottom. So he jettisons the Bangalore’s and then, surfacing, cuts away all equipment for good measure. Machine gun fire brackets him, and he submerges again briefly. Never a strong swimmer, he heads back out to sea. For two hours, he paddles around, 200 or so yards from the shore. Though he hears or see’s nothing of the battle, he somehow gets the impression that the invasion has failed and that all other Americans are dead, wounded or have been taken prisoner. Strength fast going, in despair, he moves ashore rather than drown. Beyond the smoke, he quickly finds the fire. So he grabs a helmet from a dead man’s head, crawls on hands and knees to the sea-wall, and there finds five of his men, two of them unwounded. Like Campbell, Private First Class Jan J. Budziszewski is carried to the bottom by his load of two Bangalore’s. He hugs them half a minute before realising that he will either release them or drown. Next, he chucks off his helmet and pack and drops his rifle. Then he surfaces. After swimming 200 yards, he sees that he is moving in exactly the wrong direction. So he turns about and heads for the beach, where he crawls ashore ‘under a rain of bullets’. In his path lies a dead Ranger. Budziszewski takes the dead man’s helmet, rifle and canteen, and crawls on to the sea-wall. The only survivor from Campbell’s boat section to get off the beach, he spends his day walking to and fro along the foot of the buff, looking for a friendly face. But he meets only strangers, and none shows any interest in him. In Lieutenant William B. Williams’ boat, the coxswain steers sharp left and away from Zappacosta’s sector. Not seeing the Captain die, Williams’ doesn’t know that command has passed to him. Guiding on his own instinct, the coxswain moves along the coast 600 yards, the puts the boat straight in. It’s a good guess; he has found a little vacuum in the battle. The ramp drops on dry sand and the boat team jumps ashore. Yet, it’s a close thing. Mortar fire has dogged them all the way; and as the last rifleman clears the ramp, one shell lands dead centre of the boat, blows it apart and kills the coxswain. Momentarily, the beach is free of fire, but the men cannot cross it in a bound. Weak from sickness and fear, they move at a crawl, dragging their equipment. By the end of 20 minutes, Williams’ and ten men are over the sand and resting on the lee of the sea-wall. Five others are hit by machine gun fire crossing the beach; six men, last seen while taking cover in a tidal pocket, are never heard from again. More mortar fire lands around the party as Williams leads it across the road beyond the sea-wall. The men scatter. When the shelling lifts, three of them do not return. Williams leads the seven survivors up a trail towards the fortified village of Les Moulins atop the bluff. He recognises the ground and knows that he is taking on a tough target. Les Moulins is perched above a draw, up which winds a dirt road from the beach, designated on the invasion maps as Exit No.3. Williams and his crew of seven are the first Americans to approach it D-Day morning. Machine gun fire from a concrete pillbox sweeps over them as they near the brow of the hill, moving now at a crawl through thick grass. Williams says to the others: ‘Stay here; we’re too big a target!’ They hug earth, and he crawls forward alone, moving via a shallow gully. Without being detected, he gets to within 20 yards of the gun, obliquely down slope from it. He heaves a grenade; but he has held it just a bit too long and it explodes in the air, just outside the embrasure. His second grenade hits the concrete wall and bounces right back at him. Three of its slugs hit him in the shoulders. Then, from out of the pillbox, a German potato masher sails down on him and explodes just a few feet away; five more fragments cut into him. He starts crawling back to his men; en route, three bullets from the machine gun rip his rump and right leg. The seven are still there. Williams hands his map and compass to Staff Sergeant Frank M. Price, saying: ‘It’s your job now. But go the other way-toward Vierville.’ Price starts to look at Williams wounds, but Williams shakes him off, saying: ‘No, get moving.’ He then settles himself in a hole in the embankment, stays there all day and at last gets medical attention just before midnight. On leaving Williams, Price’s first act is to hand map and compass (the symbols of leadership) to Technical Sergeant William Pearce, whose seniority the Lieutenant has overlooked. They cross the draw, one man at a time, and some distance beyond come to a ravine; on the far side, they bump their first hedgerow, and as they look for an entrance, fire comes against them. Behind a second hedgerow, not more than 30 yards away, are seven Germans, five rifles and two burp guns. On exactly even terms, these two forces engage for the better part of an hour, apparently with no one getting hit. Then Pearce settles the fight by crawling along a drainage ditch to the enemy flank. He kills the seven Germans with a Browning Automatic Rifle. For Pearce and his friends, it is a first taste of battle; its success is giddying. Heads up, they walk along the road straight into Vierville, disregarding all precautions. They get away with it only because that village is already firmly in the hands of Lieutenant Walter P. Taylor of Baker Company and 20 men from his boat team. When Baker Company’s assault wave breaks up just short of the surf where Able Company is in ordeal, Taylor’s coxswain swings his boat sharp left, then heads toward the shore about half way between Zappacosta’s boat and Williams’. Until a few seconds after the ramp drops, this bit of beach next to the village called Hamel-au-Pretre is blessedly clear of fire. No mortar shells crown the start. Taylor leads his section crawling across the beach and over the sea wall, losing four men killed and two wounded (machine gun fire) in this brief movement. Some yards off to his right, Taylor has seen Lieutenants Harold Donaldson and Emil Winkler shot dead. But there is no halt for reflection; Taylor leads the section by trail straight up the bluff and into Vierville, where his luck continues. In a two-hour fight, he whips a German platoon without losing a man. The village is quiet when Pearce joins him. Pearce says: ‘Williams is shot up back there and can’t move.’ Says Taylor: ‘I guess that makes me company commander.’ Answers Pearce: ‘This is probably all of Baker Company.’ Pearce takes a head count; they number 28, including Taylor. Says Taylor: ‘That ought to be enough. Follow me!’ Inland from Vierville about 500 yards lies the Chateau de Vaumicel, imposing in its rock-walled massiveness , its hedgerow-bordered fields all entrenched and interconnected with artillery proof tunnels. To every man but Taylor, the target looks prohibitive. Still, they follow him. Fire stops them 100 yards short of the Chateau. The Germans are behind a hedgerow at mid-distance. Still feeling their way, Taylor’s men flatten, open fire with rifles, and toss a few grenades, though the distance seems too great. By sheer chance, one grenade glances off the helmet of a German squatting in a foxhole. He jumps up, shouting: ‘ Kamerad! Kamerad!’ Thereupon, 24 of the enemy walk from behind the hedgerow with their hands in the air. Taylor pairs off one of his riflemen to march the prisoners back to the beach. The brief fight costs him three wounded. Within the Chateau, he takes two more prisoners, a German doctor and his first-aid man. Taylor puts them on ‘a kind of a parole’, leaving his three wounded in their keeping while moving his platoon to the first crossroads beyond the Chateau. Here, he is stopped by the sudden arrival of three truck loads of German infantry, who deploy into the fields on both flanks of his position and start an envelopment. The manpower odds, about three to one against him, are too heavy. In the first trade of fire, lasting not more than two minutes, a rifleman lying beside Taylor is killed, three others are wounded, and the BAR is shot from Pearce’s hands. That leaves but 20 men and no automatic weapons. Taylor yells: ‘Back to the Chateau!’ They go out, crawling as far as the first hedgerow; then they rise and trot along, supporting their wounded. Taylor is the last man out, having stayed behind to cover the withdrawal with his carbine until the hedgerows interdict fire against the others. So far, the small group has had no contact with any other part of the expedition, and for all its members know, the invasion may have failed. They make it to the Chateau. The enemy comes on and moves in close. The attacking fire builds up. But the stone walls are fire slotted, and, through the midday and early afternoon, these ports well serve the American riflemen. The question is whether the ammunition will outlast the Germans. It is answered at sundown, just as the supply runs out, by the arrival of 15 Rangers who join their fire with Taylor’s, and the Germans fade back. Already Taylor and his force are further south than any element of the right flank of the Omaha expedition. But Taylor isn’t satisfied. The battalion objective, as specified for the close of D-Day, is still more than one-half mile to the westward. He says to the others: ‘We’ve got to make it.’ So he leads them forth, once again serving as front scout, 18 of his own riflemen and 15 Rangers following in column. One man is killed by a bullet getting away from Vaumicel. Dark closes over them. They prepare to bivouac. Having got almost to the village of Louvieres, they are by this time almost one-half mile in front of anything else in the United States Army. There, a runner reaches them with the message that the remnants of the battalion are assembling 700 yards closer to the sea; Taylor and party are directed to fall back on them. It is done. Later, still under the spell, Price paid the perfect tribute to Taylor. He said: ‘We saw no sign of fear in him. Watching him made men of us. Marching or fighting, he was leading. We followed him because there was nothing else to do.’ Taylor is a luminous figure in the story of D-Day, one of 47 immortals of Omaha who, by their dauntless initiative at widely-separated points along the beach, saved the landing from total stagnation and disaster. Courage and luck are his in extraordinary measure. Thousands of Americans were spilled onto Omaha Beach. The high ground was won by a handful of men like Taylor who on that day burned with a flame bright beyond common understanding. Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall, 1963
On the morning of June 6, we were up before dawn on the deck of the Chase. I carried my lightweight typewriter strapped to my back, encased in a raincoat for waterproofing. My other impedimenta included a blanket, a canteen of water, a couple of boxes of K-rations, and a notebook and pencil. I was to go ashore in the same landing craft as Brigadier General Willard Wyman, assistant divisional commander for the 1st, whose job it was to help organise the troops on the beach. His partner in this job was Brigadier General Norman Cota, assistant commander of the 29th Infantry Division. The first and second waves of troops-scheduled to land at 6.30am and 7.00am – had been thrown into disorder. Boats swung from their courses and drove through gaps wherever they could find them. This was possible because between 7.00am and 8.00am the tide rose eight feet in the Channel. But units landed far from their assigned sectors. Commanders were separated from their troops. Sections were fragmented. And those who landed were pinned to the beach by heavy machine gun fire, artillery, and mortar fire. We rode the rising tide through one of the gaps and waded ashore at 8.00am. As far as I could see through the smoke of battle, troops were lying along a shelf of shale. Ahead of us stretched mined sand dunes to the bluffs where the Germans were sheltered in their trenches, bunkers, and blockhouses. There was no cover for the men on the beach. The Germans were looking down on them – and it was a shooting gallery. There were many brave men on Omaha that day – Dutch Cota, Bill Wyman, George Taylor, and scores of men whose names were never imprinted on the honour roll of Omaha Beach. Under the guns of the enemy, they organised small units and established small islands of order in the chaos. In what seemed a formless, confused horde, there did emerge gradually a core of discipline. And even as the Germans believed they were wining this battle on the beach, units of infantrymen were working their way through the minefields and up the bluff. I remember vividly Private Vinton Dove of Washington, DC. His name has remained with me to this day. He drove a bulldozer from a landing craft and then he began bulldozing a road from the beach as calmly as though he were grading a driveway at home. He sat there with only a sweatshirt to protect him from bullets and shell fragments. The firepower of the navy was one of our salvations in those first few hours. I recall that we were about 200 yards west of a small draw on East Red marked on the maps as E-1 or Exit 1. A blockhouse had been built into the bluff above the dirt road that led inland. The German gunners manning an 88mm weapon had a clear field of fire to the west. They were firing at almost point-blank range at the landing craft and the troops trapped at the edge of the water. A radio call for help went from an Army-Navy beach team to a destroyer. We saw the destroyer come racing towards the beach and swing broadside, exposing herself to the fire of the batteries on the bluff. One shell from the destroyer tore a chunk of concrete from the side of the blockhouse. Another nicked the top. A third ripped off a corner. And then the fourth shell smashed into the gun port to silence the weapon. Always, in my mind, the knocking out of this gun was a major turning-point of the battle in our sector. At 1.30pm, General Wyman moved from the beach and set up his first sheltered command post in the knocked-out blockhouse, and this was where I wrote my first story of the landing. As I saw it, that was when the battle of the beach was won – seven hours after the first wave hit the beach. Don Whitehead A Correspondent’s View of D-Day, 1971
Support from naval units, necessarily limited during the first landings, began to count heavily later on. Some of the landing craft had tried to support the debarking troops with the fire from their light guns. When Company G, 116th Infantry, was landing near Les Moulins, the infantry saw a patrol craft standoff directly in front of the enemy strong point to the east of the draw and pump shell after shell into it. German artillery got the craft’s range and forced it ashore still firing; it continued in action until a shell made a direct hit, setting the craft ablaze. Later in the morning, two landing craft made a conspicuous, fighting arrival in front of E-3 draw. LCT 30 drove at full speed through the obstacles, all weapons firing, and continued the firing on an enemy emplacement after touchdown. At the same time, LCI (L) 544 rammed through the obstacles, firing on machine gun nests in a fortified house. These exploits also helped demonstrate that the obstacles could be breached by larger craft, which had been hesitating at the approaches. Naval gun – fire became a major factor as communications improved between shore and ships. At first, targets were still hard to find; Gunfire Support Craft Group reported at 0915 that danger to friendly troops hampered fire on targets of opportunity; a Naval Shore Fire Control in contact with the ships was told by General Cota (about 0800) that it was ‘unwise to designate a target’. Between 1000 and 1100, two destroyers closed to within a thousand yards to put the strong points from Les Moulins eastward under heavy, effective fire. All along the beach, infantry pinned at the seawall and engineers trying to get at the draws to carry out their mission, were heartened by this intervention. Omaha Beachhead 1945
The book The Bedford Boys talks about this company. It is an excellent account. A large portion of this company came from one little town in Virginia, since it was a National Guard formation. I think I remember that Bedford had 49 or there about killed that one day, which was a huge number as Bedford only had a couple thousand inhabitants. Just about everyone lost a family member. The National D-Day Memorial is at Bedford. FIRST WAVE AT OMAHA BEACH Able Company of the 116th Infantry of the 29th Division, riding the tide in seven Higgins boats, is still 5,000 yards from the beach when first taken under artillery fire. The shells fall short. At 1,000 yards, Boat No.5 is hit dead on and flounders. Six men drown before help arrives. Second Lieutenant Edward Gearing and 20 others paddle around until picked up by naval craft, thereby missing the fight at the shore line. It’s their lucky day. The other six boats ride unscathed to within 100 yards of the shore, where a shell into Boat No.3 kills two men. Another dozen drown, taking to the water as the boat sinks. That leaves five boats. ...... Thousands of Americans were spilled onto Omaha Beach. The high ground was won by a handful of men like Taylor who on that day burned with a flame bright beyond common understanding. Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall, 1963
Thanks for this guys I am going on a Normandy Battlefield tour and my presentation is on Omaha Beach and this thread helps me a great deal. My questions are: Why were the landings at Omaha successful and why did they nearly fail? How important was Brig Gen Cota to the eventual success? What does his performance teach us about leadership under pressure? Should be a good trip. Dee
