Omaha Beach – codenamed after a town in Nebraska – stretches for 6 km past the villages of Vierville, Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, and Colleville. This area is located between utah beach, the second American beach and the British sector Gold.
At the entrance to the steep valleys leading to the beach, the Germans built:
- no less than fourteen fortified strongpoints
- anti-tank walls and ditches
- machine gun and mortar nests
- minefields and barbed wire
To destroy this defensive system held by the 352e infantry division arrived as reinforcements in April 1944, the Allies planned night aerial bombardments and naval artillery fire from the first light of dawn. It was on this beach that the 1re and 29the Infantry Division of Generals Gerhardt and Huebner. The infantrymen's mission was to establish a link between Utah Beach and Gold Beach, and a solid beachhead along 30 km of coastline before advancing towards Saint-Lô.
Bombing of the coasts
Before the landing, aerial bombardments and naval artillery fire pounded the coast of Omaha for three-quarters of an hour.
It all began shortly after 3:00 a.m., when the cruiser USS Ancon, the flagship leading Force O, dropped anchor 23 km offshore in a rough sea buffeted by violent currents. At 4:30 a.m., the men boarded the barges.
At 5:45 a.m., the American battleships Texas and Arkansas, the cruisers Glasgow, Georges-Leygues and Montcalm – two French ships – and the 11 escort destroyers opened fire on the German batteries, notably the Longues-sur-Mer battery.
At 6:00 a.m., the air force took over. 329 Liberator aircraft from the 8the The US Air Force, protected by 36 squadrons of Mustangs and Spitfires, flew over the coast to drop the 13 tons of bombs on board. Flying above low clouds and fearing to hit troops approaching the shore, the bombers dropped their bombs inland, unknowingly sparing the German coastal fortifications. So when the infantry troops set foot on the Omaha sand at 000:6 a.m., the German defensive system, barely damaged, was able to repel the American assault.
The first wave of assault on Omaha
At 6:30 a.m., the first assault waves of the 1re division (the famous Big Red One) and the 29e Infantry divisions landed in the Charlie, Dog, Fox, and Easy sectors, in the center, where photographer Robert Capa would take his famous photos. Violent coastal currents pushed some units out of their assigned sectors.
1 men belonging to the 450 companies of the 8e and 16the regiments rushed forward. Facing them, above the beach, sheltered behind the embankments, the units of the 352e General Kraiss's infantry division, await the attackers firmly while the German batteries, left intact despite the bombardments, go into action.
As soon as Company A of the 116th was landede regiment was quickly annihilated on the right wing of the assault, the regiment losing nearly 1 men in a few minutes. Everywhere the deluge of German fire was terrible, enfilading the Americans on all sectors. Two companies dug in at the foot of the Moulins, four others clustered under the heights of Colleville, and finally a last one had strayed so far from its sector that it would not be able to land until an hour and a half later.
To add insult to injury, of the 83 amphibious tanks sent with the first wave, 35 sank in the open sea or were destroyed before even reaching the beaches. Those that reached the beach were destroyed by anti-tank guns. After half an hour of fighting, a few fighters barely managed to reach the shingle embankment at the foot of the hill. It was in this terrible chaos, while the first wave had not yet emerged from the water, that the 2e wave is about to land at 7:00.
The 2nd assault wave
Firste assault wave of the 29the division landed as agreed at 7:00 a.m., followed thirty minutes later by elements of the 1re division. On the beach where the tide is coming in, confusion is at its height, the men who have landed, often in a state of shock, are no longer able to advance while losses increase by the minute.
At 8:00 a.m., the elements of the 16the regiment finally manage to establish themselves in the shelter of the embankment overlooking the beach. The regiment of the Big Red One managed to bypass the German strongpoint Wn 60, before seizing it an hour later and heading towards the Grand Hameau. They cleared the first valley from 9:00 a.m. It was also in this sector that Colonel Georges Taylor of the 16the RI will drop a famous sentence to his men:
"Two kinds of men will remain on this beach: the dead and those who are about to die. So let's get the hell out of here quickly!"
At the same time, other elements of the 16e regiments landed on Easy Red managed to cross the embankment sheltered from German fire between WN 65 and 64.
At the same time, east of Vierville, 500 men from the 116the regiment and the 5the Ranger battalion scaled the cliff and reached the plateau. This was one of the very first breakthroughs. An hour later, 600 men led by General Cota, deputy commander of the 29the division, regrouped to march towards Vierville which will be reached around 11:00 a.m.
Around 9:00 a.m., the 2e and 3the battalion of 116e regiment finally managed to get between the strongpoints WN 65 and WN 66. Facing them, the soldiers of the 352e infantry division continued to put up stiff resistance, although the intensity of the fire was decreasing somewhat.
A little over 3 hours after H hour, the opening up of Omaha beach began with difficulty, at the very moment when General Bradley, head of the ground forces, was considering abandoning operations on Omaha.
The first liberations at Omaha Beach
The village of Vierville was reached around 11:00 a.m. and liberated around noon by elements of the 116th Infantry Regiment. They neutralized the strongpoints WN 65 and WN 64 around 12:00 p.m. and now allowed access to the beach exit towards the Ruquet Valley. The GIs engaged in serious fighting against the 352nd Division to control part of the village of Colleville-sur-Mer. The complete liberation of the village would not take place until the following morning. The liberation of Saint-Laurent finally came in the middle of the afternoon by the battalions of the 115th Regiment, which arrived as reinforcements during the day. This village would be liberated the following day.
Find the results of the landing on the evening of the 6th here
Who is Robert Capa?
When Robert Capa landed on Omaha, he was a war photographer for Life magazine. He was 30 years old. He had already covered the Sino-Japanese War and the Spanish Civil War. That day, he was the only photographer authorized to land with the first wave of assaults on Omaha, Easy Red sector. To capture this historic moment, Capa brought three cameras with him. Running out of film, he managed to re-embark on a barge that took him to a hospital ship. In a state of shock, the photographer took the time to reference his four rolls of six film. Arriving in Weymouth, he decided to return immediately to Normandy and entrusted his photos to a Life courier. They arrived in London just as the newspaper was closing. The photos were then developed in a panic. Only 4 blurry photos were recovered from the entire report. Capa returned to Omaha on June 6 to continue covering the Battle of Normandy. He was killed 11 years later, on May 8, 20, when he stepped on a mine while covering the Indochina War alongside the French army.
Who is General Bradley?
Embarked on the heavy cruiser USS Augusta, General Bradley was following the battle on Omaha Beach from the open sea. As head of the American ground forces, he was reading minute by minute all the reports that reached him. The news was extremely bad; his armies were about to be massacred on Omaha. Faced with the alarming level of losses and the GIs' inability to extract themselves from the beach, Bradley considered at 9:00 a.m. re-embarking the survivors for redeployment to less deadly neighboring sectors, Gold and Utah, with the risk of leaving a gaping hole in the Allied beachhead. But the situation on land was about to improve. At 9:30 a.m., Bradley received a radio telegram informing him that "the troops hitherto pinned down on Easy Green, Easy Red, and Fox Red beaches are advancing beyond the heights overlooking the beaches." The request for authorization to withdraw was therefore never sent to Eisenhower. New reinforcements arriving in Omaha at 10:30 a.m. would definitively tip the American troops over to the side of victory.
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