It was quite a sight. There was the oldest man in the D-day invasion, 56year-old Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (son of the former President) barking orders at Utah Beach. Although he had a heart condition, Roosevelt insisted that his presence and leadership would help boost troop morale. With German artillery exploding all around him, he paraded up and down Utah Beach, ordering U.S. tanks to secure the flanks and U.S. engineers to breach eight 50-yd. lanes through beach obstacles. He refused to wear a helmet, preferring to don a knit wool hat. "We have landed in the wrong place," shouted Roosevelt, who would receive the Medal of Honor for his valor that day. "But we will start the war from here."
Everything about D-day was dramatic--the overarching strategy, the vast mobilization, the sheer number of troops. But it's the daring boldness and intrepid courage of the men that stand out. One can read biographies of Dwight Eisenhower or watch film footage shot by John Ford, but the only way to understand D-day, the largest invasion force ever assembled, is as a battle at its smallest: that is, one soldier and one reminiscence at a time.
The landing target of the D-day invaders was a 50-mile stretch of shoreline in the middle of the Cherbourg--Le Havre crescent in France. On the night of June 5, the operation began as Allied paratroopers boarded planes and gliders. "O.K., let's go" was Eisenhower's direct order. Just after midnight, June 6, they began landing behind enemy lines, with orders to attack and destroy German gun batteries. Meanwhile, an armada started making its way toward the designated beaches. Allied troops began landing at 6:30 a.m. Wading through the water onto French soil, they met vastly different fates. At Utah Beach, the farthest west, bombardments had decimated the German defenses. Moreover, an opportune navigational mistake had landed the troops at a practically unguarded stretch of the beach. The Americans who landed there sustained relatively few casualties. The British and Canadian forces who landed at Gold and Juno beaches fought their way ashore, according to plan, and were soon followed by tanks, the mere sight of which swept most of the German resistance away. The fighting was harder at Sword Beach, where German defenders stiffened against the specter of the Allies' capturing the nearby city of Caen. The hardest fighting of all raged throughout the day on the fifth beach, Omaha. It was a relatively narrow strand of shoreline overshadowed by 100-ft. cliffs. Troops trying to land there found themselves in a horrifying position, vulnerable to machine-gun and mortar fire from above. The only route out lay through four ravines carved by the wind and water through the cliffs. American soldiers were bewildered, their officers were confused, and their comrades were lying dead all around, in the water and on the beach. In the chaos, there were not even any boats to evacuate the wounded, many of whom died on Omaha of injuries that would have been treatable on any other beach. By late morning, amid the crushing noise, violence and justifiable fear racing through the air, some troops managed to drag themselves up the cliffs in small fighting forces. By the end of the day, at a cost too high to be measured in mere statistics, they took the beach and carved out a piece of Free France 2 miles wide and 6 miles long.