Omaha Beach
6 June 1944 · in Battle View, played out step by step on the ground where it was fought
On 6 June 1944 Allied forces landed on five beaches in Normandy, the largest seaborne invasion in history. It opened the Western Front and led to the liberation of France.
The sides
- United States, led by Omar Bradley: about 34,000 men
- Germany, led by Dietrich Kraiss: about 3,000 men
States that fought: United States of America, Nazi Germany.
How it went
Omaha Beach
D-Day: the Allies land in Normandy on five beaches to open a second front against Nazi Germany. Omaha, 8 km of sand under steep bluffs, is the American beach between Utah and the British beaches, and the hardest. The bombers have missed: their bombs fall inland, behind the German positions.
H-Hour
At 6:30, at low tide, the first landing craft drop their ramps. Many are far from where they should be; most of the amphibious tanks launched at sea sink in the swell. Men wade ashore across 300 m of open sand under machine-gun fire.
Pinned on the beach
At the Vierville draw one company loses nearly every man in minutes. The survivors crawl to the shingle and the sea wall and stay there. The engineers blow only a few gaps in the obstacles before the tide covers them.
The destroyers
By mid-morning General Bradley thinks of taking the men off the beach. Instead destroyers steam in so close they scrape the bottom and fire point-blank at the strongpoints.
Up the bluffs
"Two kinds of people are staying on this beach: the dead and those who are going to die. Now let's get the hell out of here," a colonel tells his men. Small groups climb the bluffs between the draws and take the strongpoints from behind.
Omaha Beach
By nightfall 34,000 men are ashore, holding a strip of France less than 2 km deep, at a cost of some 2,400 killed, wounded and missing. The draws are open, and the build-up for the battle of Normandy can begin.
American numbers are those landed by nightfall; the first waves were some 9,000 men. About 1,100 Germans held the strongpoints along the beach itself.
People and wars
- World War II in Europe (1939–1945 CE): The European theatre of the deadliest war in history, from Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 to its surrender in May 1945. Tens of millions died, including six million Jews in the Holocaust.