On D-Day, the valley of death was a beach named Omaha
by Gerald Parshall and John Marks
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At a treetop observation post above Omaha Beach, Lt. Hans Heinze was incredulous as he looked out to sea. Wiping off his binoculars, he looked again and then gave them to his messenger to look as well. The fog that had obscured their vision moments before had lifted, and the vast armada bearing down upon them -- ship after ship after ship -- was now unmistakable. "Sie kommen!" Heinze exclaimed. They are coming! He scribbled a message to his battalion headquarters and handed it to the messenger. "They'll never believe it," he thought.
On the bluffs nearby, Lt. Friedrich Frerking stood with binoculars pressed to his eyes. He said softly, as if arguing with himself, "That's not possible! That's not possible!" He tossed the binoculars to Pfc. Hein Severloh, his orderly. Severloh felt his chest tighten. As he heard other cries of disbelief echo through the fortifications all along the beach, he retreated into a bunker to pray. Although the early hours after midnight had brought reports of paratroop landings, the last two weeks had seen many false alarms. Most officers and men had assumed this was another.
Allied intelligence believed Omaha Beach was defended by 800 men from the 716th Division, a poorly equipped Wehrmacht defense unit made up largely of overage troops, Poles and other non-Germans. In fact, 2,000 men occupied the high ground -- protected by a network of bunkers, gun emplacements, blockhouses, pillboxes and zigzag trenches that disfigured the verdant bluffs like scars on the face of a beautiful mademoiselle.
The defenders belonged not to the woebegone 716th but to the 352nd Grenadier Division, a new unit whose arrival in Normandy had gone undetected by the Allies for more than two months. Half of the new division's troops were 18- and 19-year-olds from Hanover, well trained and well motivated. An additional 200 on the cliffs were battle-hardened veterans of the eastern front. But as Heinze stood staring into the channel, he knew that the 352nd was being asked to turn back history's greatest invasion. The ships were so thick that the sea couldn't be seen between them. Heinze was only 21, but he felt ancient. On the eastern front, he had watched the Russians overwhelm the forces of the fatherland with men -- outnumbering them by 5 or 10 to 1. Now, the Allies would overwhelm the Reich with machines.
At the leading edge of the armada, the men of the 116th Infantry plowed the whitecaps in assault boats. After 20 months of training in the English countryside, they figured they were as ready as they would ever be for their first taste of combat. On the eve of D-Day, each had prepared himself in his own way. Pvt. John Barnes of A Company made a bargain with God: Spare me and I'll become a priest. But Barnes had canceled the deal and decided to take his chances. Pvt. Gilbert Murdoch of A Company slipped a photo of his fiancee into the liner of his helmet. Pvt. Felix Branham of K Company asked each member of his boat team to sign the 500-franc note he had won in a gin rummy game as a talisman. Referring to the troop transport carrying them toward the beach, he told his comrades, "Some of us are getting off this thing and never getting back on."
Dear Sis. In B Company, Pvt. Harold Baumgarten assumed he'd be among the ones to die. He wrote his sister in New York to get to the mailbox first so she could break the news to his parents gently. On D-Day, he donned a field jacket with a Star of David on the back and the lettering, "The Bronx, New York."
Elsewhere, bravura vied with black humor as the GIs waited for the attack to begin. At Headquarters Company, Capt. Robert Walker and a few comrades were writing their own "invasion music," using a popular baseball song as a model: Take me out to the beachhead, Take me out with the troops. Put some Spam and jam in a sack, I don't think that we'll ever get back; So it's shoot, shoot, shoot for the Gen'ral, If we don't win, it's a shaaame; So it's one, two, three shots and you're dead, At the old beachhead. Three thousand in all, the men of the 116th Infantry were the first wave in an ocean of Allied military manpower. In less than 12 hours, they and the 1st Division's 16th Regiment would punch through Hitler's Atlantic wall, winning glory at a fearful price in blood. A Virginia National Guard unit, the 116th Infantry dated from before the Revolution. Fighting for the Confederacy under Stonewall Jackson, it had become a legend, winning the sobriquet "Stonewall Brigade" by standing with its commander like a stone wall against Yankee advances at the First Battle of Bull Run. The regiment now included both drawling lads from the Blue Ridge Mountains ("Yawl cum ovah. Ya heah?") and "dese" and "dem" boys from the urban North -- all of them escapees from their nation's biggest economic crisis into history's biggest war.
Away all boats. On D-Day morning, three great transports lowered the Stonewall Brigade onto a turbulent English Channel. Pitching crazily in 90 assault boats, the men vomited their breakfasts of Spam and eggs, bailed with their helmets as the sea slopped in and thought, as their feet turned blue: What a relief it will be to get to Omaha Beach. Dawn revealed a gray blur ahead. The blur grew into bluffs 120 feet high. The 4 miles of coastline Allied planners had code named "Omaha Beach" was exactly where the maps said it was. Ready, Adolf? Booms reverberated and muzzle flashes skipped across the water when Allied warships opened fire at 5:50 a.m. The Stonewallers' sodden spirits soared as they saw huge projectiles tumbling inland from the 14-inch guns of the battleship Texas.
"There go our holes on the beach!" someone shouted hopefully. Briefers had promised the men on the boats that the rockets and an aerial bombardment would pock the beach with ready-made foxholes, and to the Stonewallers the D-Day plan seemed to be working perfectly. The battle plan for Operation Overlord called for the Navy to decimate the beach's defenders with a bombardment from the sea while the Air Corps did the same from the air. The 116th was then to storm ashore on the western half of Omaha Beach as troops of the 1st Division took the beach's eastern half, clearing the way for 35,000 men and 2,400 tons of equipment -- everything from jeeps and howitzers to blood plasma and toilet paper to be landed by day's end.
But Robert Walker, the Headquarters Company captain, was shocked by what he saw as the assault boats circled offshore, awaiting the first wave's landing at 6:30. A perilous 300 yards wide at low tide, the beach contained not a single crater. Beach houses and other structures were largely intact, and the landscape remained green (although grass fires ignited by naval shells were spreading fast). "Where is the damned Air Corps?" Walker said to no one in particular. Flying blind above the clouds, where they were invisible to the Stonewallers, the B-17 bombers had delayed dropping their bombs a few seconds for fear of hitting Allied forces, and the bombs had fallen on fields several miles behind the coastline. The Navy's rockets and shells had failed to destroy any part of the German fortifications.
"I'm going to land with a comb in one hand and a pass to Paris in the other," Sgt. Robert Bixler of D Company had joked several hours earlier, running a hand through his blond locks. Bixler wasn't laughing now as German artillery opened up, raising huge waterspouts around the bobbing assault boats. Nowhere was the carnage worse than in Company A. Even before the action began, one of its boats had foundered 1,000 yards out, after shipping too much water during the run in. At 50 yards out, a direct hit on a Company A landing craft killed two men and sent 28 panic-stricken soldiers leaping into the sea. Then a second boat exploded before it could drop its ramp, killing the company commander, Capt. Taylor Fellers, and 31 men. As th
