Omaha Beach: The Bloodiest Hour of D-Day

Of the five Allied landing beaches on 6 June 1944, Omaha was the one that nearly failed. The defenses were the strongest, the geography the most hostile, and the casualties the heaviest of the day. This is the morning that earned the name "Bloody Omaha," told beach sector by beach sector, draw by draw, from the first ramps dropping into machine-gun fire to the cemetery that now stands on the bluff above.

The Plan and the Defenses

Omaha was the central American beach in Operation Overlord, assigned to the U.S. V Corps. Two infantry divisions would assault it: the 1st Infantry Division, the "Big Red One," on the eastern half, and the 29th Infantry Division, the "Blue and Gray," on the western half, with attached Ranger battalions. Allied planners divided the roughly 8-kilometer arc, west to east, into named sectors: Charlie, Dog Green, Dog White, Dog Red, Easy Green, Easy Red, Fox Green, and Fox Red. The casualty reports of the day are still written in those sector names.

The geography was the whole problem. Omaha is a concave arc backed not by dunes but by a shingle bank and then bluffs 30 to 50 meters high, with only a handful of draws cutting up through the high ground toward the villages of Vierville, Saint-Laurent, and Colleville. Anyone wanting to get off the sand and inland had to funnel through those draws. The German defenders understood this exactly and built a chain of concrete strongpoints, Widerstandsnester ("resistance nests"), on the bluffs specifically to cover them. The most powerful, WN-62, overlooked the Easy Red and Fox Green sectors above Colleville with machine guns, mortars, and anti-tank guns commanding the eastern beach.

The tide turned the geography lethal. Omaha's spring tidal range exceeds 6 meters, so at low water the sea withdrew to expose a flat several hundred meters wide, seeded with mined obstacles, stakes, and steel hedgehogs. The landing was timed for a rising tide so the obstacles would be visible, which meant the first waves had to cross that entire killing flat on foot, in the open, while the strongpoints fired down on them.

The Morning Assault

Almost everything meant to protect the first wave failed. The pre-landing naval and air bombardment largely overshot the bunkers and left them intact. The DD amphibious tanks, swimming tanks meant to land with the infantry and provide covering fire, mostly foundered and sank in the rough sea before reaching shore. The leading companies walked off the ramps into interlocking machine-gun fire with almost nothing firing back.

Company A of the 116th Infantry Regiment, landing in the Dog Green sector below the Vierville draw, was effectively destroyed in the first minutes, with casualties commonly cited near 90 percent. Up and down the beach, units came ashore scattered by the current, leaderless, and pinned against the shingle bank. For the first two hours the assault stalled on the sand; the men who survived the water lay behind the low seawall and the shingle, unable to move forward into the draws the Germans had pre-sighted.

The breaking of the deadlock came not from the plan but from individual leadership on the beach. On the western half, Brigadier General Norman "Dutch" Cota of the 29th Division came ashore in the Dog White sector about an hour after H-Hour and moved upright among the pinned men, organizing a push off the beach; his line to the 5th Ranger Battalion, "Rangers, lead the way," became the Ranger Regiment's motto. On the eastern half, Colonel George A. Taylor of the 16th Infantry rallied his men with the order that there were only two kinds of people staying on the beach, the dead and those about to die, and that they had to get off it. (The line is often misattributed to Cota because of its use in the 1962 film "The Longest Day.")

Why It Was "Bloody Omaha"

The numbers must be given with care. American casualties at Omaha on 6 June 1944 are most frequently cited at roughly 2,400, with some sources putting the figure as high as 2,500 and breaking it into perhaps 1,000 to 1,200 killed and a comparable number wounded. A precise, verified count was never possible; the chaos of the morning made exact accounting impossible, and the figures vary by source. The 1st Infantry Division's losses for the day are estimated near 1,036 and the 29th Division's near 743, with the 116th and 16th Infantry Regiments bearing the worst of it.

The defense has its own contested arithmetic. The German machine-gunner Heinrich Severloh, who manned a position at WN-62 above Colleville, later claimed in his memoir to have fired some 13,500 rounds and caused enormous American losses, the source of the "Beast of Omaha" nickname. Historians treat his casualty claims as a gross and uncheckable overestimate; cite him for the texture of the defense, not for a body count.

To the west, a separate Ranger action shaped the same morning. Lieutenant Colonel James Rudder's 2nd Ranger Battalion, a force of about 225 men, scaled the roughly 30-meter (100-foot) cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, between Omaha and Utah, to destroy a battery of 155mm guns capable of firing on both beaches. They reached the top to find the gun emplacements empty, the guns having been moved inland; they located and disabled them in a nearby orchard. After two days of fighting and counterattack at Pointe du Hoc, only about 90 of Rudder's force were still able to fight.

The Breakout

The assault was unbudged on the sand, but it did not break. Through late morning, small mixed groups infiltrated up the bluffs between the defended draws rather than through them, climbing where the Germans had not concentrated fire. On the eastern beach, Captain Joe Dawson of G Company, 16th Infantry, led a party up the bluff above the Easy Red sector and helped open the way toward Colleville. Surviving tanks of the 741st Tank Battalion paired with infantry to form tank-infantry teams that pushed inland.

The draws themselves were opened from above and behind. Cota's force, with Rangers and elements of the 116th, worked through the Vierville draw and cleared the German positions covering it, while the 2nd Rangers reduced the strongpoints on the eastern side. By early afternoon the E-1 draw above Saint-Laurent and the routes toward Colleville were being forced. By nightfall roughly 34,000 men had been landed across Omaha, holding a precarious strip around the three villages, far short of the day's objectives but ashore and, by then, immovable.

The Mulberry Harbor and the Cemetery

In the days after the landing, the Americans assembled an artificial harbor off Vierville and Saint-Laurent, Mulberry "A," using sunken concrete Phoenix caissons as breakwaters to land supplies without a captured port. A severe Channel storm on 19 June 1944, one of the worst in decades, wrecked it beyond repair only days after it began working. Its British twin, Mulberry "B" at Arromanches up the coast, survived and ran for months as "Port Winston." The broken Phoenix caissons of Mulberry "A" still stand out of the water off the beach at low tide.

The dead are above the beach. The Normandy American Cemetery occupies 172.5 acres on the bluff at Colleville-sur-Mer, on ground ceded to the United States in perpetuity by France and dedicated on 19 July 1956. It holds 9,389 graves, 9,238 Latin crosses and 151 Stars of David, with 1,557 names on its Walls of the Missing; among the buried is Theodore Roosevelt Jr. The exact grave count is sometimes reported as 9,387 or 9,388 by secondary sources, but the American Battle Monuments Commission, the official custodian, states 9,389.

Down on the sand at Saint-Laurent stands "Les Braves," a stainless-steel sculpture about 15 meters wide by the French artist Anilore Banon, installed for the 60th anniversary on 6 June 2004; its three elements are titled the Wings of Hope, Rise Freedom, and the Wings of Fraternity. The memory of the morning was fixed in wider culture by the opening of Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" (1998), a roughly 24-minute reconstruction of the landing filmed not here but on Curracloe Beach in County Wexford, Ireland, for practical and moral reasons. The real beach is consecrated ground, and a film crew cannot blow it up.

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