Daily Reporter
Of all the debts of gratitude we owe to those who have given their lives in service to freedom, none is arguably greater than that due to the vanishingly small number of men who splashed ashore in France 75 years ago today.
History shows that upwards of 160,000 Allied troops came ashore in Normandy during the invasion of Hitler’s Fortess Europe starting about 6 a.m. on June 6, 1944. (About 13,000 airborne troops had parachuted behind German lines the night before and were busy securing bridges, severing communications lines and working to secure the flanks of the 60-mile invasion front.)
The landings, memorialized ever since, began the climactic military battle of the 20th century. In less than half a day, defenses that were said to be impregnable were overrun. In 10 months, an empire expected to last a thousand years was toppled.
What is sometimes overlooked, however, is the frightful slaughter suffered by the very first troops whose landing craft became easy targets once startled German defenders zeroed in on them that fateful morning.
These were infantrymen in the U.S. 1st and 29th divisions, fewer than 3,000 in all, wallowing slowly in the English Channel toward a beach — code-named Omaha — where every square inch was plotted on field-of-fire diagrams on German bunker walls on a bluff above.
Many of them, attached to units whose lineage had colonial roots, were seeing combat for the first time. They were very young; the oldest ones were college-age. They were well-trained, but nothing could prepare them for the fearsome fire that quickly enveloped their ranks.
The bows of their landing crafts were big ramps, and when they opened to drop into the water, German machine gun fire — at the rate of more than 1,000 rounds per minute per gun — eviscerated them. As described in such histories as Cornelius Ryan’s “The Longest Day” and Stephen Ambrose’s “D-Day,” each Higgins boat carried 30 troops. A number of companies set out for the beach with more than 200 men. In the first hours of the invasion, these units were reduced to fewer than 30 troops. Some boats didn’t unload a single soldier who made it to the beach.
Today, many of those troops are among the nearly 9,400 soldiers buried in the Normandy American Cemetery, located on the high ground troops took later that day thanks to the courageous initiative taken by small groups of soldiers who began to fight back and — pillbox by pillbox — helped succeeding waves gain the beachhead.
How these young, terrified soldiers rallied is an inspiring story of heroism. Many more such stories would follow in the months to come. But 75 years ago today, this small group of men — all but a tiny handful of whom are now gone — clawed their way off a faraway beach with nothing more than rifles and a few hand grenades and began to push back the tide of evil.
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