Stand on Omaha Beach at low tide and the first thing that strikes you is the distance. From the waterline to the shingle bank is several hundred metres of open, flat sand with no cover of any kind. Behind it the ground rises into bluffs a hundred feet high. On the morning of 6 June 1944, every metre of that sand was covered by German machine guns, mortars and artillery sited in concrete strongpoints along the crest.
The plan had assumed the defences would be shattered before the infantry arrived. They were not. The aerial bombardment, released seconds late through heavy cloud, fell inland and left the beach defences untouched. The naval bombardment was too short to do the job alone. Of the amphibious tanks launched to swim ashore in the first wave, most foundered in a heavy sea well short of the beach, taking their crews with them and depriving the infantry of the armoured support the plan depended on.
What came ashore in the first thirty minutes, then, was infantry with rifles against fortified positions that were entirely intact. The 29th Infantry Division landed in the western sector, the 1st Infantry Division in the east. Companies came ashore hundreds of metres from their intended sectors, scattered by the tidal current, landing on ground they had not studied and beside units they did not know. Some sections lost most of their strength before they had crossed the sand.
The turn came not from the plan but from small groups of men improvising under fire. Officers and NCOs gathered whoever was to hand, worked out that staying on the beach was fatal, and pushed inland through the draws and up the bluffs between the strongpoints. Destroyers closed to dangerously shallow water and fired directly into the German positions at close range. By the afternoon the strongpoints were being taken from behind and from above, one at a time, and men were moving off the beach in numbers.
The cost is difficult to state precisely and estimates vary, but American casualties at Omaha on 6 June ran to some two thousand — far heavier than any other landing beach that day. What visitors find hardest to grasp is not the number but the ground itself: the plain fact of how far those men had to walk, in the open, before they could do anything at all about the fire coming down on them.
The German strongpoint WN62, whose remains sit above the eastern end of the beach, is worth the climb. From the defenders' firing positions you look down on the whole sweep of sand the Americans had to cross, and the tactical problem stops being an abstraction. It is one of the few places in Normandy where you can stand where the defenders stood and understand exactly what they saw.