Machine guns chattered, mortar shells exploded and shrapnel whirled across Omaha Beach on the morning of June 6 1944. D-Day, the most ambitious Allied military operation of the Second World War, was underway as American infantrymen assaulted the 4.5-mile (7km) ribbon of otherwise nondescript sands that the German defenders had turned into a killing ground.
Intended to pierce Hitler’s vaunted Atlantic Wall defences and open a second Allied front in Western Europe, the operation was a tremendous undertaking as 150,000 troops hit the five invasion beaches of Normandy. The combat was fierce in several areas, but nowhere more so than windswept Omaha Beach, where the issue was in doubt for hours. The heroism of officers like 1st Lieutenant Jimmie Monteith tipped the scales that terrible day – from possible defeat to hard-won victory.
Company L, 3rd Battalion, 116th Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, was fully immersed in the maelstrom on Omaha as its soldiers slogged through the surf under fire, sought temporary cover, then made the move against their assigned objective: the opening of the Cabourg Draw.
Five of the six landing craft intended to bring Company L ashore reached the beach, but heavy currents had dragged some of them off course. Nevertheless, Monteith managed to bring his platoon ashore amid the chaos. Omaha is remembered today as the most fiercely contested of the landing sectors, where approximately 2,500 American soldiers of the 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions were killed or wounded.
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NAUMACHIA TRUTH BEHIND ROME'S GLADIATOR SEA BATTLES
In their quest for evermore novel and bloody entertainment, the Romans staged enormous naval fights on artificial lakes
OPERATION MANNA
In late April 1945, millions of Dutch civilians were starving as Nazi retribution for the failed Operation Market Garden cut off supplies. eet as In response, Allied bombers launched a risky mission to air-drop food
GASSING HITLER
Just a month before the end of WWI, the future Fuhrer was blinded by a British shell and invalided away from the frontline. Over a century later, has the artillery brigade that launched the fateful attack finally been identified?
SALAMANCA
After years of largely defensive campaigning, Lieutenant General Arthur Wellesley went on the offensive against a French invasion of Andalusia
HUMBERT 'ROCKY'VERSACE
Early in the Vietnam War, a dedicated US Special Forces officer defied his merciless Viet Cong captors and inspired his fellow POWs to survive
LEYTE 1944 SINKING THE RISING SUN
One of the more difficult island campaigns in WWII's Pacific Theatre saw a brutal months-long fight that exhausted Japan’s military strength
MAD DAWN
How technology transformed strategic thinking and military doctrine from the Cold War to the current day
BRUSHES WITH ARMAGEDDON
Humanity came close to self-annihilation with the Cuban Missile Crisis, Broken Arrows’ and other nuclear near misses
THE DEADLY RACE
How the road to peace led to an arms contest between the USA and USSR, with prototypes, proliferation and the world’s biggest bomb
THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
Einstein, Oppenheimer and the race to beat Hitler to the bomb. How a science project in the desert helped win a war
