From the cliff above, the German gunners are shooting into the survivors as from a roof top. Captain Taylor N. Fellers and Lieutenant Benjamin R. Kearfott never make it. But exactly what happened to this boat and its human cargo was never to be known.
No one saw the craft go down. How each man aboard it met death remains unreported. Half of the drowned bodies were later found along the beach. It is supposed that the others were claimed by the sea.
Along the beach, only one Able Company officer still lives—Lieutenant Elijah Nance, who is hit in the heel as he quits the boat and hit in the belly by a second bullet as he makes the sand. By the end of ten minutes, every sergeant is either dead or wounded. To the eyes of such men as Private Howard I.
Murdock, this clean sweep suggests that the Germans on the high ground have spotted all leaders and concentrated fire their way. Among the men who are still moving in with the tide, rifles, packs, and helmets have already been cast away in the interests of survival. The ramp drops. In that instant, two machine guns concentrate their fire on the opening.
Not a man is given time to jump. All aboard are cut down where they stand. By the end of fifteen minutes, Able Company has still not fired a weapon.
No orders are being given by anyone. No words are spoken. The few able-bodied survivors move or not as they see fit. Merely to stay alive is a full-time job. The fight has become a rescue operation in which nothing counts but the force of a strong example. Above all others stands out the first-aid man, Thomas Breedin. Reaching the sands, he strips off pack, blouse, helmet, and boots. For a moment he stands there so that others on the strand will see him and get the same idea.
Then he crawls into the water to pull in wounded men about to be overlapped by the tide. The deeper water is still spotted with tide walkers advancing at the same pace as the rising water.
Coming along, they pick up wounded comrades and float them to the shore raftwise. Machine-gun fire still rakes the water.
Burst after burst spoils the rescue act, shooting the floating man from the hands of the walker or killing both together. But Breedin for this hour leads a charmed life and stays with his work indomitably. By the end of one half hour, approximately two thirds of the company is forever gone. There is no precise casualty figure for that moment. There is for the Normandy landing as a whole no accurate figure for the first hour or first day.
The circumstances precluded it. Whether more Able Company riflemen died from water than from fire is known only to heaven. All earthly evidence so indicates, but cannot prove it. By the end of one hour, the survivors from the main body have crawled across the sand to the foot of the bluff, where there is a narrow sanctuary of defiladed space.
There they lie all day, clean spent, unarmed, too shocked to feel hunger, incapable even of talking to one another. No one happens by to succor them, ask what has happened, provide water, or offer unwanted pity. D Day at Omaha afforded no time or space for such missions. Every landing company was overloaded by its own assault problems. By the end of one hour and forty-five minutes, six survivors from the boat section on the extreme right shake loose and work their way to a shelf a few rods up the cliff.
Four fall exhausted from the short climb and advance no farther. They stay there through the day, seeing no one else from the company. The other two, Privates Jake Shefer and Thomas Lovejoy, join a group from the Second Ranger Battalion, which is assaulting Pointe du Hoc to the right of the company sector, and fight on with the Rangers through the day. Two men. Two rifles.
Baker Company which is scheduled to land twenty-six minutes after Able and right on top of it, supporting and reinforcing, has had its full load of trouble on the way in. So rough is the sea during the journey that the men have to bail furiously with their helmets to keep the six boats from swamping.
Thus preoccupied, they do not see the disaster which is overtaking Able until they are almost atop it. Then, what their eyes behold is either so limited or so staggering to the senses that control withers, the assault wave begins to dissolve, and disunity induced by fear virtually cancels the mission.
Outside the pall, nothing is to be seen but a line of corpses adrift, a few heads bobbing in the water and the crimson-running tide. But this is enough for the British coxswains. We must pull off. In the command boat, Captain Ettore V. Zappacosta pulls a Colt. The aid man, Thomas Kenser, sees him bleeding from hip and shoulder.
Kenser jumps toward him and is shot dead while in the air. Lieutenant Tom Dallas of Charley Company, who has come along to make a reconnaissance, is the third man.
He makes it to the edge of the sand. There a machine-gun burst blows his head apart before he can flatten. Lieutenant General Omar Bradley considered abandoning the entire operation.
Slowly but surely, however, his men began making it across the beach to the relative safety of the seawall at the foot of the bluffs and then up the bluffs themselves. Assistance came from a group of Army Rangers who scaled a massive promontory between Omaha and Utah to take out artillery pieces stashed in an orchard, and from U.
By nightfall, the Americans had carved out a tenuous toehold about 1. Gold Beach Owing to the direction of the tides, British troops began storming Gold, the middle of the five D-Day beaches, nearly an hour after fighting got underway at Utah and Omaha. The Germans initially put up robust resistance, but in sharp contrast to Omaha, an earlier aerial bombardment had wiped out much of their defenses. British warships also proved effective.
Within an hour, the British had secured a few beach exits, and from there they rapidly pushed inland. They also captured the fishing village of Arromanches, which days later became the site of an artificial harbor used by the Allies to unload supplies.
Juno Beach At Juno, Allied landing craft once again struggled with rough seas, along with offshore shoals and enemy mines. More than 10, men are killed in the clashes, especially on Omaha Beach.
Nowadays, it is possible to visit the landing beaches both for remembrance work and to relax, swim or have fun with the family. Near the beaches, the graves of soldiers who died fighting for freedom line up in the rows of military cemeteries.
The beaches of Normandy were the scene of a major historical turning point in the 20th century. These stretches of sand, steeped in history, are home to several sites commemorating the Allied landings of 6 June : museographies explaining the course of the military operations, but also memorials, cemeteries and places of meditation in memory of the thousands of men who fell during the Battle of Normandy. The D-Day landing museum is also not to be missed during your stay. Juno Beach, in Courseulles-sur-Mer , is where the Canadian forces landed.
On D-Day, nearly 14, Canadians and 9, British launched an assault on the enemy. However, losses were heavy and many men lost their lives on the beach.
Located in Arromanches , Gold Beach was the central location for the landing. It was the 50th Northumbrian, led by the famous General Graham, who landed there on 6 June An artificial harbour was built there, the remains of which can still be seen today.
This sowed confusion as well as restored calm. All was quiet. The Germans were in shock; they had not expected a landing on that area. A strong current had caused Allies to veer 2 km south from the initial landing area. The W5 blockhouse was destroyed by men led by General Theodore Roosevelt , the eldest son of the former and cousin of the then current US President.
There began their mission.
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