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II - ASSAULT OF THE BLUFFS ON OMAHA BEACH
The outstanding fact about these first two hours of action is that despite heavy casualties, loss of equipment, disorganization, and all the other discouraging features of the landings, the assault troops did not stay pinned down behind the sea wall and embankment. At half-a-dozen or more points on the long stretch, they found the necessary drive to leave their cover and move out over the open beach flat toward the bluffs. Prevented by circumstance of mislandings from using carefully rehearsed tactics, they improvised assault methods to deal with what defenses they found before them. In nearly every case where advance was attempted, it carried through the enemy beach defenses. Some penetrations were made by units of company strength; some were made by intermingled sections of different companies; some were accomplished by groups of 20 or 30 men, unaware that any other assaults were under way. Even on such terrain as Omaha Beach, the phenomenon of battlefield "isolation" was a common occurrence, and units often failed to see what was going on 200 yards to their flanks on the open beach.
Various factors, some of them difficult to evaluate, played a part in the success of these advances. Chance was certainly one; some units happened to be at points where the enemy defenses were weak, where smoke from grass fires gave concealment, or where dangerous strongpoints had been partly neutralized by naval fire or by the tanks. At one or two areas of penetration, notably Fox Green, destroyers' guns and tanks were called on for support during the assault and rendered good service. Combat engineers blew many of the gaps through enemy wire, helped get across minefields, and took part as infantry in some of the fighting on and past the bluffs.
But the decisive factor was leadership. Wherever an advance was made, it depended on the presence of some few individuals, officers and noncommissioned officers, who inspired, encouraged, or bullied their men forward, often by making the first forward moves. On Easy Red a lieutenant and a wounded sergeant of divisional engineers stood up under fire and walked over to inspect the wire obstacles just beyond the embankment. The lieutenant came back and, hands on hips, looked down disgustedly at the men lying behind the shingle bank. "Are you going to lay there and get killed, or get up and do something about it?" Nobody stirred, so the sergeant and the officer got the materials and blew the wire. On the same sector, where a group advancing across the flat was held up by a marshy area suspected of being mined, it was a lieutenant of engineers who crawled ahead through the mud on his belly, probing for mines with a hunting knife in the absence of other equipment. When remnants of an isolated boat section of Company B, 116th Infantry, were stopped by fire from a well-concealed emplacement, the lieutenant in charge went after it single-handed. In trying to grenade the rifle pit he was hit by three rifle bullets and eight grenade fragments, including some from his own grenade. He turned his map and compass over to a sergeant and ordered his group to press on inland.
One characteristic of these early penetrations was to influence the rest of the action on D-Day at Omaha: the penetrations were made not at the draws but in areas between them, by advances up the bluffs. Mislandings may have had something to do with this, but the chief factor seems to have been the survival of the enemy strongpoints protecting the draws, for units which landed directly in front of them, especially at D-1, D3, and E-3, had suffered crippling losses and were unable to press the assault. The first advances were effected in the intervals between strongpoints, where the enemy defenses were thin. The routes planned as exits for movement of tanks and vehicles from the beach were not cleared.
[Omaha Beachhead (6 June-13 June 1944) - American Forces in Action Series - Historical Division - War Department - 20 September 1945]
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