This is the signal awaited by the Germans atop the bluff. ramps are dropped along the boat line and the men jump off in water anywhere from waist deep to higher than a manвЂ™s head. His men are at the sides of the boat, straining for a view of the target. 2 cries out: вЂњMy God, weвЂ™re coming in at the right spot, but look at it! No shingle, no wall, no shell holes, no cover. Another dozen drown, taking to the water as the boat sinks. The other six boats ride unscathed to within one hundred yards of the shore, where a shell into Boat No. Second Lieutenant Edward Gearing and twenty others paddle around until picked up by naval craft, thereby missing the fight at the shore line.

Their story is lifted from my fading Normandy notebook, which covers the landing of every Omaha company.ДЄble Company riding the tide in seven Higgins boats is still five thousand yards from the beach when first taken under artillery fire. Doubt it? Then letвЂ™s follow along with Able and Baker companies, 116th Infantry, 29th Division. In everything that has been written about Omaha until now, there is less blood and iron than in the original field notes covering any battalion landing in the first wave. Even such an otherwise splendid and popular book on the great adventure as Cornelius RyanвЂ™s The Longest Day misses the essence of the Omaha story. The official accounts which came later took their cue from this secondary source instead of searching the original documents. The worst-fated companies were overlooked, the more wretched personal experiences were toned down, and disproportionate attention was paid to the little element of courageous success in a situation which was largely characterized by tragic failure. But their ordeal has gone unmarked because its detail was largely ignored by history in the first place. Several contributed not a man or bullet to the battle for the high ground.

Three times that number were shattered or foundered before they could start to fight. They did better than others mainly because they had the luck to touch down on a less deadly section of the beach. On this two-division front landing, only six rifle companies were relatively effective as units. But to follow that rule slights the story of Omaha as an epic human tragedy which in the early hours bordered on total disaster. Normandy was an American victory it was their duty to trace the twists and turns of fortune by which success was won. So saying does not imply that their judgment was wrong. This happened because the Army historians who wrote the first official book about Omaha Beach, basing it on the field notes, did a calculated job of sifting and weighting the material. As published today, the map data showing where the troops came ashore check exactly with the work done in the field but the accompanying narrative describing their ordeal is a sanitized version of the original field notes. How they fought and what they suffered were also determined in detail during the field research.

Owing to the fact that every unit save one had been mislanded, it took this work to show the troops where they had fought. It was this research by the field historians which first determined where each company had hit the beach and by what route it had moved inland. While the troops were still fighting in Normandy, what had happened to each unit in the landing had become known through the eyewitness testimony of all survivors. This fluke of history is doubly ironic since no other decisive battle has ever been so thoroughly reported for the official record. Unlike what happens to other great battles, the passing of the years and the retelling of the story have softened the horror of Omaha Beach on D Day.

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