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D-Day on Omaha Beach
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I - e - Conditions on Omaha Beach: 0730-0800
Infantry units were not the only assault elements to come ashore in the period from 0700 to 0800. The 81st Chemical Weapons Battalion, combat engineer battalions, advance elements of the Provisional Engineer Special Brigade Group, naval shore fire control parties, advance elements of artillery units, medical detachments, and antiaircraft units were included in the landings before 0800, and artillery was due to start landing during the next hour. Mislandings of these elements operated, as they had with the infantry, to snarl the assault plans. Engineer units with special assignments to carry out in clearing exits or marking beaches found themselves hundreds or even thousands of yards away from the targets, sometimes separated from their equipment or losing it in the debarkment. An engineer unit with panels for marking Dog Red Beach landed on Easy Red, over a mile away; they set up their panels anyway. About 0830 an officer on Dog White noticed two engineers making slow progress as they lugged a heavy box of explosives along the open beach behind the sea wall. As they stopped to rest, one of them wiped the sweat off his face and asked, "Where are we? We are supposed to blow something up down toward Vierville." They picked up the box and moved along toward the hottest section of the beach.
Navigational difficulties in landing increased as the tide advanced into and past the obstacles. On most of the beaches no gaps had been cleared. Landing craft, including now the larger LCI's and LST's, had to find a way through and avoid the mines affixed to the timbers. Some craft bumped on sandbars in the middle of obstacles and hurried to drop their ramps in deep water; others maneuvered somehow through the surf and got all the way in. There are not many recorded instances of craft sunk by the obstacles before getting their troops off, though on LCA 853 half of the 116th's boat team was killed by a mine explosion. However, crippling damage was inflicted on many craft, often in their efforts to retract after touchdown, or as a result of enemy artillery and mortar hits while the craft were delayed in the obstacles. Only a few were destroyed by this fire, but enough to make a vivid and discouraging impression on the men watching from the shelter of the embankment.
One of the spectacular disasters of the day was suffered by LCI 91, approaching Dog White about 0740 and carrying the alternate headquarters of the 116th RCT. Handled by a veteran crew with experience at Sicily and Salerno, the LCI was struck by artillery fire as it made a first attempt to get through the obstacles. Backing out, the craft came in again for a second try. Element "C" was barely showing above the rising tide, and the LCI could not get past. The ramps were dropped in six feet of water. As some officers led the way off, an artillery shell (or rocket) hit the crowded forward deck and sent up a sheet of flame. Clothes burning, men jumped or fell off into the sea and tried to swim in under continued artillery fire. It is estimated that no personnel escaped from No. 1 compartment of the craft out of the 25 carried there. A few minutes later LCI 92 came into the same sector and suffered almost the same fate, an underwater explosion setting off the fuel tanks. The two craft burned for hours. Much of the artillery fire at this end of the beach was coming from the enemy gun positions toward Pointe de la Percee. The tanks had been given those flank positions as a priority target, but they found themselves fully occupied by enemy strongpoints in front of the landings.
At the other end of the beach, LCI 85 came in to Fox Green with Company A of the 1st Medical Battalion, attached to the 16th RCT. The craft slid over the pilings of Element "C," then stuck, and was. at once hit forward by artillery fire. The crew decided the water was too deep for unloading, backed the craft off the piling, and pulled out for another try. Number 3 hold was burning, and the craft was listing from a hit below the water line. On the second attempt only a few men had got off when the ramps were shot away, and fire broke out in the two forward holds. Practically rendered a hospital ship for medical personnel, LCI 85 backed off again, put out the fires, and managed to transfer its many casualties to another ship.
Conditions could hardly have been worse for the landing of vehicles, now beginning to arrive. If the halftracks, jeeps, and trucks survived the difficulties of getting close enough in to avoid deep water, and of unloading in surf under artillery fire, they found themselves on a narrowing strip of sand without any exits opened through the impassable shingle embankment. Wherever vehicles landed close together, a few were liable to be immobilized by engine trouble or artillery hits, and the others were then caught in a hopeless traffic jam. Enemy artillery and mortars had easy targets.
Losses in equipment ran high during the first landings, affecting all types of materiel. Engineer supplies, necessary for clearing the beaches, were seriously reduced. The 397th AAA AW Battalion lost 28 of its 36 machine guns disembarking, and infantry units experienced great difficulty in getting their heavy weapons ashore. All weapons were likely to be temporarily put out of action by the effects of water and sand; the first thing some units did on reaching cover was to strip and clean their rifles . Though much special equipment, such as bangalore torpedoes, ammunition, and heavy weapons, had been jettisoned when men were debarked in deep water, much more was saved at the: cost of casualties to the men who were slowed down in carrying it. Losses in radio equipment were particularly heavy, and water damaged many sets that reached the beach. Colonel Canham reported that three-fourths of the 116th RCT's radios were destroyed or rendered useless in the landings. This loss was to hamper control of the assault infantry, both on the beach and throughout the day.
As headquarters groups arrived from 0730 on, they found much the same picture at whatever sector they landed. Along 6,000 yards of beach, behind sea wall or shingle embankment, elements of the assault force were immobilized in what might well appear to be hopeless confusion. As a result of mislandings, many companies were so scattered that they could not be organized as tactical units. At some places, notably in front of the German strongpoints guarding draws, losses in officers and noncommissioned officers were so high that remnants of units were practically leaderless. Bunching of landings had intermingled sections of several companies on crowded sectors like Dog White, Easy Green, and Fox Green. Engineers, navy personnel from wrecked craft, naval shore fire control parties, and elements of other support units were mixed in with the infantry. In some areas, later arrivals found it impossible to find room behind the shingle and had to lie on the open sands behind. Disorganization was inevitable, and dealing with it was rendered difficult by the lack of communications and the mislanding of command groups. However, even landing at the best point, a command party could only influence a narrow sector of beach. It was a situation which put it up to small units, sometimes only a remnant of single boat sections, to solve their own problems of organization and morale.
There was, definitely, a problem of morale. The survivors of the beach crossing, many of whom were experiencing their first enemy fire, had seen heavy losses among their comrades or in neighboring units. No action could be fought in circumstances more calculated to heighten the moral effects of such losses. Behind them, the tide was drowning wounded men who had been cut down on the sands and was carrying bodies ashore just below the shingle. Disasters to the later landing waves were still occurring, to remind of the potency of enemy fire. Stunned and shaken by what they had experienced, men could easily find the sea wall and shingle bank all too welcome a cover. It was not much protection from artillery or mortar shells, but it did give defilade from sniper and machine-gun fire. Ahead of them, with wire and minefields to get through, was the beach flat, fully exposed to enemy fire; beyond that the bare and steep bluffs, with enemy strongpoints still in action. That the enemy fire was probably weakening and in many sectors was light would be hard for the troops behind the shingle to appreciate. What they could see was what they had suffered already and what they had to cross to get at the German emplacements. Except for supporting fire of tanks on some sectors, they could count on little but their own weapons. Naval gunfire had practically ceased when the infantry reached the beach; the ships were under orders not to fire, unless exceptionally definite targets offered, until liaison was established with fire control parties. Lacking this liaison, the destroyers did not dare bring fire on the strongpoints through which infantry might be advancing on the smokeobscured bluffs.
At 0800, German observers on the bluff sizing up the grim picture below them might well have felt that the invasion was stopped at the edge of the water. Actually, at three or four places on the four-mile beachfront, U. S. troops were already breaking through the shallow crust of enemy defenses.
[Omaha Beachhead (6 June-13 June 1944) - American Forces in Action Series - Historical Division - War Department - 20 September 1945]
Never Forget
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