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Operation Overlord was the toughest of military propositions: an attack by sea against a fortified enemy defense line. The very thought gave Churchill nightmares. He told Eisenhower, "When I think of the beaches of Normandy choked with the flower of American and British youth, and when in my mind's eye I see the tides running red with their blood, I have my doubts. I have my doubts." The Prime Minister was both right and wrong: the scenes of death he envisioned occurred, but the Allies seized the beaches and held them.
On June 6, just after midnight, 16,000 paratroopers from the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions dropped chaotically into the dark coastal countryside to protect the western flank of the incoming army against counterattacks. Lost in low clouds, many of the planes missed their drop sites by miles, but the scattered paratroopers, snapping cricket noisemakers to find each other, gradually regrouped and moved toward the beach. An additional 8,000 men from the British 6th Airborne jumped in to guard the eastern flank, catching the Germans guarding key bridges by complete surprise.
H-hour on the beaches, code-named Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Utah, came at 6:30 a.m. Thousands upon thousands of infantrymen packed into 1,500 boxy, flat-bottomed landing craft called Higgins boats churned toward shore. The weather had cleared, as predicted, but the wind still kicked up heavy waves that made most of the troops violently seasick. As the coastline appeared in the gray, misty light, the soldiers, each laden with almost 70 lbs. of wet battle gear, jumped neck-deep into the waves and scrambled ashore.
All battles are remarkable for their chaos: at Normandy the deafening noise, sudden explosions, invisible gunfire and jagged beach obstacles turned a carefully orchestrated plan into a thousand extemporaneous fragments. And still, the plan worked. At Gold, Juno and Sword beaches a force drawn mostly from Lieut. General Sir Miles Dempsey's British Second Army, and including a Canadian division and Free French, Polish and Dutch troops, moved steadily onto the sand and into the countryside. On the western end at Utah Beach, the U.S. 4th Division waded ashore under protective naval fire and linked up with the paratroopers.
But at Omaha, right in the center of the entire front, soldiers of the 1st and 29th Infantry divisions walked straight into heavy German machine-gun and artillery fire. Bodies piled up in the shallows amid wrenching cries for help. Officers struggled to rally those pinned down on the beach, but there were only four exits through the bluffs along the shore, and they were well covered by German guns. As a few Rangers managed to scale the heights, Navy ships steamed close along the shore to blast the German gun emplacements.
Lieut. General Omar Bradley, commander of the U.S. contingent, watched through his binoculars. He feared that "our forces had suffered an irreversible catastrophe" and considered holding back the reinforcements headed for Omaha. That could have spelled disaster for the whole invasion if the Germans had attacked Omaha Beach in force. Then at 1:30 p.m. Bradley received a radio message that the Americans were inching up the bluffs. Another wave of troops rushed in to bolster those on the shore. Said Bradley later: "Every man who set foot on Omaha Beach that day was a hero."