#116thinfantry

Battle of Normandy, D-Day - Landing transport, Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944

"My God, we're coming in at the right spot, but look at it! No shingle, no wall, no shell holes, no cover. Nothing!" – Lt.  Edward Tidrick, 116th Infantry, 29th Division

On June 6, 1944, from the clifftops at Omaha Beach, the Germans fired anti-tank guns, light artillery, riffles, mortars and machine guns at the arriving U.S. troops.  Omaha Beach had the highest casualty rate of the out of the five allied landing points.  

The transports were timed to arrive midway between high and low tides.  At 6:30 a.m. the ramps dropped.  The men jumped into the water which was waist deep or above a man’s head. The overburden packs dragged the men down.  Some of the men managed to grasp the sides of the boat to stay afloat.

The survivors struggled out of their packs to float with the tide to shore.  The Germans opened fire, ripping apart the approaching men.  The sea turned red. The lightly wounded drowned, still wearing their packs.  

Within seven minutes the first wave is inert.  Most of the officers are dead.  One transport disappeared, leaving only bodies that float ashore.  Within 15 minutes, the first company has not fired a shot. Approximately two thirds never make it off the beach alive.

The transports continue to arrive.  The men who escape drowning, had to cross open sand, using water-filled troughs called runnels.  The next obstacles were a sea wall topped with razor wire, a minefield up to 200 yards long, and scaling cliffs up to 170 feet tall to reach the German positions.

My first post is dedicated to the fighting men of Item Company, 3rd Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment, 29th Infantry Division.

These men from Northern Virginia would land on Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6th, 1944, and would continue to push the German army back through difficult and bloody hedgerow fighting until finally capturing the city of St. Lo on July 18th. August would see these men fighting through Brittany during the attack on Brest, eventually opening the port of Brest for future supply chains to fuel the push east into Germany. They would spend the winter of 1944-45 pushing through the Rhineland, until the war in Europe concluded in the spring of 1945.

The 116th is very near and dear to me, as local veterans are buried near all over Northern Virginia, and whose lives were irrevocably changed by this momentous war.