Soldiers have crossed the seas in ships for several thousand years to assail their enemies on foreign shores, but in terms of scale and intention, the amphibious assault on the Normandy coast was-is-unprecedented. The immediate objective of the landings, in military parlance, was “to secure a lodgment” on the beaches strong enough to repel the inevitable German counterattack, and hang on to the beachhead while sufficient combat power was brought to bear from across the channel in order to initiate a major armored thrust to the East to crush Hitler’s formidable war machine. Three thousand alone fell in the near-disaster on Omaha-more than on all the other beaches combined. Over the course of the “longest day,” 10,000 servicemen-Brits, Frenchmen, Poles, and other allies in addition to Americans, who suffered the lion’s share of the casualties-were killed or wounded. Using American tank fire on the beach to spot the location of the main enemy emplacements, the destroyers’ five-inch shells decimated the most formidable German positions within 90 minutes. On their own initiative, a dozen destroyers sallied forth into dangerously shallow waters in front of the beach-so close they took fire from German rifle rounds. “I gained the impression,” recalled the American general in command of the landing, “that our forces had suffered an irreversible catastrophe.”īut Omar Bradley was wrong. The preliminary naval and air bombardments had utterly failed to reduce the German strongpoints. Many infantry in the first waves drowned, having disembarked from their landing craft in water over their heads. Most of the specially designed amphibious behemoths, along with other combat vehicles and heavy weapons, had sunk in the rough surf en route to the beach. on June 6, 1944, the intensity of fire from well over 100 well-dug-in Wehrmacht machine guns and antitank weapons positioned in the bluffs behind the beach shut down the landings, leaving the early waves of assault troops stranded with little cover and only a handful of Sherman tanks. Just two hours after the initial landings at 6:30 a.m.
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