![]() The Germans initially put up robust resistance, but in sharp contrast to Omaha, an earlier aerial bombardment had wiped out much of their defenses. 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. ![]() By nightfall, the Americans had carved out a tenuous toehold about 1.5 miles deep.ĬOMMEMORATE THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY OF D-DAY WITH HISTORY TRAVEL™. warships that moved perilously close to shore to fire shells at the German fortifications. 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.S. 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. Lieutenant General Omar Bradley considered abandoning the entire operation. infantrymen in the initial waves of the attack were then gunned down in mass by German machine-gun fire. To make matters worse, an aerial bombardment did little damage to the strongly fortified German positions, rough surf wreaked havoc with the Allied landing craft and only two of 29 amphibious tanks launched at sea managed to reach the shore. ![]() The troubles for the Americans began early on, when Army intelligence underestimated the number of German soldiers in the area. troops turning up dead, wounded or missing. Surrounded by steep cliffs and heavily defended, Omaha was the bloodiest of the D-Day beaches, with roughly 2,400 U.S. By noon, his men had linked up with some of the paratroopers, and by day’s end they had advanced four miles inland, suffering relatively few casualties in the process. Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the son of former President Theodore Roosevelt, shouted upon realizing the mistake. Luckily for them, this area was actually less well protected. forces landed more than a mile away from their intended destination, due in part to strong currents. Forced to improvise, they nonetheless succeeded in seizing the four causeways that served as the beach’s only exit points. Those who landed, meanwhile, often found themselves outside of their designated drop zones. One even hung from a church steeple for two hours before being captured. Weighed down by their heavy equipment, many drowned in the flooded marshlands at the rear of the beach, and others were shot out of the sky by enemy fire. paratroopers dropped inland behind enemy lines. In the predawn darkness of June 6, thousands of U.S. The westernmost of the D-Day beaches, Utah was added to the invasion plans at the 11th hour so that the Allies would be within striking distance of the port city of Cherbourg. One of the largest and most extensively planned amphibious military assaults in history, it led to the liberation of France and, ultimately, the rest of Western Europe. The Allied operation, code-named Operation Overlord, sent some 156,000 American, British and Canadian troops to assault on five German-occupied beaches along a 50-mile stretch of France's heavily fortified Normandy coast. It's widely agreed among historians that D-Day, which began June 6, 1944, marked a turning point in World War II.
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