| Omaha Beach, where it could all have foundered, and nearly did. With immense heroism, the US army eventually got off the beach and moved inland, losing 2400 dead and many wounded in the process. Here are a few photos from Omaha Beach as it was on Tuesday, 6 October, 2015 - 71 years after the landing. (designed for hi-res widescreen monitors) |
- MAP of Omaha Beach
- Wikipedia link
- A personal, unsanitized account
- History site
- What went wrong? (a master's thesis)
- What went wrong? (Guardian article)
- documentary (Youtube: 1.5 hrs)
- "Saving Private Ryan": (Youtube 8 mins)
- Sergeant Harry Bare of F Company landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day. He retells his story here: "Company F assault boat landed on Dog Red Beach, further east than planned. In spite of all this, the plans made back in England just didn't exist in reality when we hit the beach. Fire rained down on us, machinegun, rifle, rockets from the bunkers on top of the cliff... as a ranking noncom, I tried to get my men off the boat and make it somehow to the cliff, but it was horrible—men frozen in the sand, unable to move. My radioman had his head blown off three yards from me. The beach was covered with bodies - men with no legs, no arms - God, it was awful. It was absolutely terrible."
- At Omaha Beach, bombs dropped by B-17 Flying Fortresses and a massive bombardment of 14- and 12-inch diameter shells from the battleships Texas and Arkansas were supposed to obliterate landing obstacles and clear minefields. Because of the cloud cover, the B-17s dropped their bombs inland behind the beach defenses. From their stations six miles off the coast, the overcast made it difficult for the Texas and Arkansas to find their targets. Even with added gunfire from cruisers and destroyers closer to shore, the beach was still blocked by obstacles, barbed wire and enemy gun emplacements when soldiers landed.
Up and down the beachhead, infantry had counted on support from amphibious dual drive tanks, also known as DD tanks or “Donald Ducks.” Along with a waterproof “skirt” that could be erected to make it buoyant, each tank had a propeller that would allow it to swim to shore from two miles out. The DDs were capable of operating in waves no higher than one foot from trough to crest. In the storm-whipped sea off of Normandy that day, waves ran six feet high and water flooded over the tops of the buoyancy skirts. Few DDs reached the shore anywhere along the Normandy coast. At Omaha, 27 of the 29 DD tanks that set out for the beach sank before they got there.