Eighty-two years ago this morning, the largest air, land, and sea invasion in history began on the shores of Normandy, with 5,000 ships, 11,000 airplanes, and more than 155,000 soldiers, sailors, coast guardsmen, and airmen. When the ramps and doors dropped at dawn on June 6, 1944, many of those men were not yet twenty.
Colonel Paul R. Goode told the men of the 175th Infantry what to expect. "You get your ass on the beach. I'll be there waiting for you and I'll tell you what to do. There ain't anything in this plan that is going to go right."
Hours earlier and miles inland, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Wolverton gathered the paratroopers of the 3rd Battalion, 506th, and asked them to pray with him on their knees. "God almighty, in a few short hours we will be in battle with the enemy. We do not join battle afraid." Then he said, "Move out." He was killed by machine gun fire in an orchard outside Saint-Côme-du-Mont. Of the men in his plane, four others died, seven were captured, and three kept fighting.
The men in the boats carried more than eighty pounds, weak with seasickness after days on rough water, and some sank under their loads in the shallows. Sergeant Ray Lambert, a medic with the 1st Infantry Division, was in the first wave. "The ramp went down, and we were in water over our heads. Some of the men drowned. Some got hit by the bullets. The boat next to ours blew up." On the beach he turned to Corporal Meyers and said, "If there's a hell, this has got to be it." A minute later Meyers was dead.
The 1st and 29th were caught in a kill zone with two hundred yards of open sand in front of them. Robert Capa, the only journalist in the first wave, said to himself, "This is a very serious business." Colonel Charles Canham of the 116th shouted, "They're murdering us here! Let's move inland and get murdered!" Colonel George Taylor of the 16th drove his men off the shingle: "Two kinds of people are staying on this beach, the dead and those who are going to die."
Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the only general in the first wave, landed far off the intended point at Utah, looked at the ground he had, and said, cane in hand, "Okay. We'll start the war from right here." He had hidden his failing heart from his superiors and died of a heart attack weeks later. First Sergeant Carwood Lipton of the 101st said, "I took chances on D-Day that I never would have taken later in the war."
Sergeant Robert Niland of the 82nd Airborne was killed in the dark that morning. His brother Preston, who landed at Utah with the 4th Infantry Division, was killed the next day. A third brother had been shot down over Burma three weeks before and was presumed dead. General George C. Marshall ordered the surviving brother, Fritz, found and pulled off the battlefield, and that story became Saving Private Ryan. The Burma brother turned up alive a year later in a Japanese prison camp. By the close of June 6 the Allies had taken 10,000 casualties, and more than 4,000 were dead.
A visit to Normandy should begin and end on the bluffs at Colleville-sur-Mer, above Omaha. The bay below is a grave, because hundreds killed in the water were never recovered. Behind you the white crosses run to the horizon, and today children play among them. General John J. Pershing said of the fallen, "Time will not dim the glory of their deeds." The men who waded ashore are nearly gone now.
The ones who lived came home to towns that had moved on and started over. They went to school on the GI Bill, poured the highways, ran the plants, and raised the children. First Lieutenant George Allen of the 1st Infantry Division came off Omaha and retired a farmer in New Jersey. "All I remember is mayhem, dead bodies floating in the water, busted equipment. We lost a lot of good men that day." Every Christmas Eve for the rest of his life he stepped outside alone. "I look up in the sky, and I talk to my men. I talk to every one of them."
Read the full essay on Substack: https://heroespath.substack.com/p/the-last-best-thing