Omaha Beach Invasion

Early break of the day hours on June 6, 1944, paratroopers from the British 1st Airborne Division silently dropped and drifted towards the Pegasus Bridge, one of the few bridges that conduct everyplace the Seine towards Normandy. Moments later, they stormed the bridge with heavy casualties. The Allied intrusion of Hitlers Fortress Europe has just begun (Dube, 2005).On those hours, lantern-equipped pathfinders dropped all in all over the Cotentin Peninsula. Alone and unaided, they were dropped to mark the way for the thousands of men coming in behind them.At dawn, the sea invasion began as an Allied Armada disgorged thousands of military personnel at five shorees along Frances Normandy coast. Allied obliges stormed the shores and battled the German defenses in a fight that would go down as the Longest Day in history.The beachs terrain turn out to be an important factor in the assault (Lewis 2000). Its crescent form is bounded at all end by rocky lessenings and its tidal st adium is gently sloping. At the western end the shingle bank rested against a stone, which fades further into wood, resembles a sea wall which ranged from 4 feet to12 feet in height. penetrative bluffs then raised senior high school up to 170 feet, dominating the whole beach and cut into by small wooded valleys.The Germans, earlier anticipating for an attack in the beachheads, constructed three lines of obstacles in the water. This consisted of Belgian Gates with mines lashed to the uprights, logs goaded into the sand pointing seaward and hedgehogs installed 130 yards from the shoreline. The area between the shingle bank and the bluffs was both wired and exploit with the latter also scattered on the bluff slopes (Gerrard, Bujeiro and Zaloga, 2003).Their troops were concentrated mostly around the entrances to the draws and protected by minefields and wire (Dube, 2005). Each bunker was interconnected by trenches and tunnels. Machine guns, light triggerman pieces and anti-tank gun s holy the disposition of artillery targeting the beach. No area of the beach was left uncovered, and the disposition of weapons meant that flanking fire could be brought to book anywhere along the beach.The Allied forces plan of attack includes dividing the Omaha beach into ten sectors. The assault landings were to start at 0630, which was coined as the H-Hour. Before that, the beach defenses will be bombarded by naval and aerial support forces. The objective lens was for the beach defenses to be exculpated two hours after assault. By the end of the day the forces at Omaha were to make established a bridgehead five miles deep into the enemy territory. To execute this plan the Omaha assault force totaled 34,000 men and 3,300 vehicles with naval support provided by 2 battleships, 3 cruisers, 12 destroyers and 105 otherwise ships (Vat and Eisenhower, 2003).However, during the initial attack, nothing went according to plan (Lewis, 2000). Ten of the landing trade winds have gone astray forward they reached the beach and some were flooded by the rough seas. some had even sunk. Smoke and mist hinders the gliding of the assault crafts while a heavy current served to push them to the east. The initial bombardment proved to be ineffective. Their mark fell too far inland, thus they hardly touched the coastal defenses. When the landing craft came closer to the shore, the were under increasingly heavy fire from automatic weapons and artilleryWith the failure of the initial assault, a back one started coming ashore about two hours later. Their mission was to bring in reinforcements, support weapons and headquarter elements. Some relief against the mostly unsuppressed enemy fire was gained simply because with more troops landing the submersion of fire was spread more about the many targets avail adequate (Dube, 2005). The survivors among the initial forces were not however able to give much covering fire and the landing troops still suffered in places the same h igh casualty rates as those in the counterbalance wave. The failure to clear sufficient paths through the beach obstacles added to the difficulties of the second wave now that the tide was beginning to cover those obstacles. The loss of landing craft as they hit these defenses before they reached the shore began to contri howevere in the rate of attrition. As in the initial landings, soaring is still difficult and the disturbing miss-landings continued to upset the Allied forces.From the Germans vantage point, at Pointe de la Percee, which is overlooking the entire beach, the assault seemed to have been stopped at the beach. An officer there historied that troops were seeking cover behind obstacles and counted ten tanks burning. However, casualties among their defenders were mounting, chiefly as a result of the consort naval fire. At the same time they were also requesting reinforcement, but their request could not be met because the lieu elsewhere in Normandy was becoming more urgent for the defenders (Dube, 2005).As the battle progresses, events of the landing were starting to influence the abutting phase of the battle. The draws, which would serve as the pathway from the beaches to the inner territory, remained strongly concentrated by the defenders. The allies necessary to go through these draws to achieve their main target for the day. Also, the issue of leadership began becoming a problem. Miss-landings and blunders in the original plan caused disorganization, and communication between units was compromised (Lewis, 2000).Despite the apparent disadvantage of the Allied forces position, continual waves of landings and naval artillery support eventually weakened the German defense.By early afternoon the strong point guarding the draw at Vierville was silenced by the navy, but without enough force on the ground to mop up the stay defenders the exit could not be opened (Dube, 2005). Traffic was eventually able to use this route by nightfall, and the sur viving tanks of the tank battalion spent the night near Vierville. The advance of the initial assault teams cleared away the last remnants of the force defending the draws. When engineers cut a road up the western gradient of this draw, it became the main route inland off the beaches. With the congestion on the beaches thus relieved, they were re-opened for the landing of vehicles.After the inland infiltration, clashes pushed the handgrip out barely a mile and a half deep in the enemy area to the east, and the whole beachhead remained under artillery fire. In the evening, the Allies completed the planned landing of infantry, although but losses in equipment were high, because of bad sea conditions. Of the 2,400 tons of supplies scheduled to be landed on D-Day, solely vitamin C tons was actually landed. Casualties were estimated at 3,000 killed, wounded and missing. The heaviest casualties were taken by the infantry tanks and engineers in the first landings. The Germans suffered 1 ,200 killed, wounded and missing. On the second day, the engineers constructed the first airfield to be built after D-Day, on the cliff near St. Laurent, and this was used by the Ninth Air Force to support the ground troops as, over the next two days, they accomplished the original D-Day objectives (Lewis, 2000).The complete invasion had not been materialized yet, and the objectives of the D-Day were not achieved. Hundreds of Allied troops are still coming, fighting is ominous, and both sides are unprepared. The D-Day, the Longest Day has ended, but the war on Liberation has just begun.ReferencesAdrian R. Lewis 2000, Omaha Beach A Flawed Victory, December 3, 2000Alan Dube 2005, A Navy Soldier on Omaha Beach, August 15, 2005Dan van der Vat and John S. D. Eisenhower 2003, D-Day The Greatest Invasion A Peoples History, by November 15, 2003Howard Gerrard, Ramiro Bujeiro, and Steven J. Zaloga 2003, Campaign 100 D-Day 1944 at Omaha Beach, July 23, 2003