D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

the beach. ‘This is the first time American troops have been here in 25 years!’
    When the ramps were dropped, the German machine-gunners concentrated their fire on the opening. In all too many cases, the landing craft had come to a halt on a sandbar short of the beach. The water appeared shallow, but ahead there were deep runnels. The more experienced coxswains, both from the US Coast Guard and the Royal Navy, knew how to cut their engine at just the right moment and allow the backwash to carry the landing craft over a sandbar. Those that did managed to land right on the beach.
    ‘As the ramp went down we were getting direct fire right into our craft,’ wrote a soldier in the 116th on the western part of Omaha. ‘My three squad leaders in front and others were hit. Some men climbed over the side. Two sailors got hit. I got off in water only ankle deep. I tried to run but the water suddenly was up to my hips. I crawled to hide behind the steel beach obstacle. Bullets hit off of it and through my pack missing me. Others hit more of my men.’
    The craft were still bucking with the waves, and ‘if you slipped under the metal ramp you would be killed as it crashed down’. In some places men leaped off and found the water over their heads. Many did not know how to swim at all. In desperation, the majority who fell into deep water dropped their weapons and wriggled out of their equipment to survive. Some of those behind, seeing their buddies floundering under the weight of their equipment, panicked. ‘Many were hit in the water, good swimmers or not,’ wrote the same soldier. ‘Screams for help came from men hit and drowning under ponderous loads ... There were dead men floating in the water and there were live men acting dead, letting the tide take them in.’
    One soldier, who jumped into five feet of water, found that ‘bullets were splashing right in front of my nose, on both sides and everywhere. Right then and there I thought of every sin I’d committed and never prayed so hard in my life.’ A member of the 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry, watched the fate of a devout non-com, Sergeant ‘Pilgrim’ Robertson. He ‘had a gaping wound in the upper right corner of his forehead. He was walking crazily in the water without his helmet. Then I saw him get down on his knees and start praying with his rosary beads. At this moment the Germans cut him in half with their deadly crossfire.’
    The prospect of crossing the stretch of beach in front of them seemed impossible. Any idea of trying to run through the shallows, carrying heavy equipment and in sodden clothes and boots, seemed like a bad dream in which limbs felt leaden and numb. Overburdened soldiers stood little chance. One had 750 rounds of machine-gun ammunition as well as his own equipment. Not surprisingly, many men afterwards estimated that their casualties would have been halved if the first wave had attacked carrying less weight.
    There were cries in all directions: ‘I’m hit! I’m hit!’ A soldier from the 1st Infantry Division who had jumped into water up to his neck waded in slowly. He felt so exhausted that he lay down in a foot of water to rest. ‘Everything seemed like slow motion, the way the men moved under all their equipment. Overloaded we didn’t have a chance. I was so tired I could hardly drag myself along.’ Only nine men out of thirty-one in his platoon survived.
    Machine-gun fire criss-crossed the beach and, ‘as it hit the wet sand, it made a “sip sip” sound like someone sucking on their teeth’. One soldier saw a fellow GI running from right to left, trying to get across. An enemy gunner shot him as he stumbled. ‘He screamed for a medic. An aid man moved quickly to help him and he was also shot. The medic lay next to the GI and both of them were screaming until they died a few minutes later.’ Some continued to shelter behind the beach obstacles as bullets clanged off them, but others realized that their only hope was to make it to the shelter of the sea wall. Company A of the 116th Regiment, landing opposite the heavily defended Vierville draw at the western end of Omaha, suffered the worst casualties.
    While the German machine-gunners turned the foreshore and surf into a killing zone, their artillery fired at the landing craft. As the V Corps report later acknowledged, the concave curve of the beach allowed the Germans both ‘frontal and enfilade’ fire. A staff sergeant in the 1st Division on the eastern side