Dawn of D-DAY by David Howarth

Author:David Howarth
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510724204
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2008-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

A great many of the 1,450 men of the eight companies of infantry also suffered this kind of experience. One company, landing on the western end of the beach, a little to the right of Rockwell’s tanks, had one of its six craft sunk half a mile from shore; men were seen jumping overboard and being dragged down by their equipment, which was too heavy to allow them to swim. A second craft was blown to pieces by mortar fire. The other four grounded and the men scrambled out, but the beach had deep runnels there, and some men were out of their depth. Intense machine gun and mortar fire enveloped them. Many were wounded in the water, and fell down and were drowned. Those who struggled to land took refuge behind the German obstacles, or went back into the sea for cover. A few formed a firing line on the water’s edge; but soon all the officers of the company and most of the sergeants were killed or wounded, and the men, without leaders, gave up any hope of advancing across the beach. Within fifteen minutes, the company was out of action. Some of its survivors stayed in the water all the morning, and succeeded in reaching safety in the end by crawling up the beach as the tide came in.

This company had landed in the right place. The only other infantry who did so were a small company of Rangers, who had a special mission on the right hand end of the beach. All the rest of the eight companies were carried eastward by the same tidal stream that had upset the landing at Utah. It had not mattered at Utah; the infantry had landed at the wrong place but in good order, and the weakness of the opposition had given them time to organise. But here at Omaha, all order was lost before the soldiers reached the shore at all. Some craft were only two hundred yards to the east of the places where they should have been; some were a mile. One company, after two of its craft were swamped, approached the shore two miles away, and had to come back against the wind and tide, and landed ninety minutes late. All the others were mixed up together. Two stretches of the beach, both half a mile long, had no infantry at all; other parts had too many. Men found themselves pitched on to the shore in single boatloads, cut off from their officers, faced with defences which were not the ones they had studied in their briefing, under a terrible gunfire which they had never been warned to expect, and with nobody to tell them where they were or what they ought to do. Almost all the heavier weapons were lost in the struggle through the surf; and most of the men who succeeded in crossing the beach and reaching the temporary safety of the shingle were so shaken by the ordeal that, for the time being, no organised action was possible.

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