Omaha Beach, second beach from the west among the five landing areas. At the start of the invasion on June 6th was that many of the soldiers were drowned and did not make it to Omaha beach. Or they were killed from the surrounding fire from the German troops on the heights surrounding the beach.
The largest of the D-Day assault areas, Omaha Beach stretched over 10 km, the entire beach was overlooked by cliffs that were 30 metres high. The problem with the beach was that there were only 5 exits to get up into the cliffs, 4 of them were dirt paths and only one was a paved road leading to the resort village of Vierville-sur-Mer. Omaha was a killing zone in its own right, there was 13 strongholds on the cliff side and a large trench system for the German soldiers. Similar with the utah assault the special “DD” tanks (amphibious tanks ) that were supposed to support the 116th Regiment sank in the choppy waters. Only 2 out of the 29 tanks made it to land on the beaches.
As time went on destroyed craft and vehicles were all along the water’s edge and at 8:30 in the morning all landing stopped at Omaha beach. The troops on the beach were left on their own and hope that they were not going to die from the gunfire. To deal with heavily entrenched Germans, navy destroyers were sent in and, scraping their bottoms in the shallow water, and blasted the German fortifications at point-blank range destroying many of the close defenses.
At the end of the day they were able to land, the Americans took 2,400 casualties at Omaha on June 6. After the landings at Omaha it allowed for a full landed invasion into the western front of Operation Overlord.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omaha_Beach
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1960/11/first-wave-at-omaha-beach/303365/
https://www.britannica.com/place/Omaha-Beach
I thought that this post was both cool and sad thinking about the bloodiness of the battle. What do you think would have happened if the Allies were unable to take this beach? Also, I found that another factor to the German's defeat was that they had begun to run out of ammo further into the battle. Furthermore I read an interesting article about how the water could both doom and save soldiers. While it caused many to drown due to their heavy equipment, it actually saved some because bullets stop soon after they hit the water.
ReplyDeleteI really like this post as you went in detail on how the allies went in to defeat the Germans on Omaha Beach. I also found it interesting that they would send in navy destroyers so close to shore were they would be vulnerable.
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