In the chilling hours before dawn on June 6th, 1944, my stepfather boarded a transport ship in England bound for the coast of France. He was a soldier in the 29th Infantry Division tasked with securing the beachhead codenamed, “Omaha.” He looked off the deck that morning to the slowly brightening skies; they were prophetically cast with heavy clouds and below him the seas churned furiously. If there was ever a morning for a soldier to not go to the battle, this was the morning.
On the distant shore, he could see the sands scattered with the dead and dying, the carnage of a first wave of infantry. The few survivors were set against a sea wall, under fire from machine guns ‘nests’ dug in on the bluffs. Between the nests massive bunkers brandishing artillery pieces defiantly fired rounds at the approaching crafts.
As my stepfather boarded the landing craft the gravity of his situation confronted him. Behind him was the safety of Britain and the entire Allied expeditionary force. Before him was an accurate concentration of firepower and the reality of death. Despite these facts, there was no turning back. A beachhead in France had to be established as a landing point for the rest of the army, and he and his fellow soldiers could not fail. It was at 7 AM when the landing craft came to a stop.
The small craft hit a sandbar a few hundred yards from the shore. The landing ramp slapped the water and a spray of bullets met the disembarking infantry. My stepfather had to wade several hundred yards to reach the beach. Many of his fellow soldiers drowned in the water because of the heavy equipment they carried. Around him, artillery fire buried landing crafts and the soldiers they carried with single shots.
The sight on the beach was more gruesome: bloody streams flowed down to the water and mangled corpses and limbs spread across the shore like a blanket. Despite the horrifying image that confronted him, he did not stop; after a one hundred yard advance he reached the sea wall. There, he and a group of soldiers began to press the battle: they poured gunfire on the enemy emplacements while fellow soldiers assaulted those positions. The fighting was intense, many times the bullets from the enemy came close but that did not stop the soldiers from doing what they had been trained. They continued to shoot while others circled to the sides of the positions and found weak points to exploit. One by one the machine gun “nests” succumbed, and small footholds were gained until the massive bunkers were infiltrated.
By noon that same day the majority of that 5 mile long beach was secure and some 34,000 men were ashore. These men would never have landed if someone had not pressed the battle against the beach; but their fight was far from over.
The fight in the hedgerows of France was equally as traumatic as the fight on the beach. The Allies had to attack blindly across rows of shrubs and trees, unsure of the strength of the enemy on the other side. During one of these attacks my stepfather’s platoon discovered they were engaging an enemy with automatic weapons. Almost immediately he was wounded by a bullet. His wounds forced him to spend many months in a field hospital recovering; he almost died of an infection, but his efforts and the efforts of many other brave soldiers had established an unshakeable foothold on the coast. Within a year Hitler was dead and Europe was free.