Operation Honor- Omaha Beach Eyewitness Accounts as compiled by Brig. Gen. Marshall, Introduction

While the fighting at Normandy still raged, Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall began reconstructing the events of D day by interviewing men who took part. His blow-by-blow, almost minute-by-minute, account of Americans at one segment of Omaha Beach is an unforgettable chronicle of death and daring, panic and heroism.

In our many hours of research surrounding Operation Overlord, D-day, and Omaha beach, we found the carefully written eye-witness accounts of Brig. Gen. S.L.A Marshall to be unparalleled. Although at times hard to read, Marshall's true, chilling portrait of what happened to our US soldiers on Omaha Beach helps today's generations to realize what these men went through for the sake of freedom.

*As a note for any parents, the following posts contain direct quotes, which include two uses of language. 

FIRST WAVE  AT OMAHA BEACH

BY BRIG. GEN. S. L. A. MARSHALL,

USAR (RET.)

 Few of the decisive battles of World War II have been as thoroughly reported for the official record as Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944. While our troops were still fighting in western France, what happened to each unit in the Normandy landing was ascertained through eyewitness testimony of survivors. This research by field historians established where each company had hit the beach and by what route it had moved inland. Because every unit but one had been miss-landed, the work was necessary in order to determine where each had fought, how it had fought, and what it had suffered. The Army historians who wrote the first book about Omaha Beach, based on this field research, necessarily did a job of sifting and weighting the material. Normandy was an American victory; the primary task was to trace the twists and turns of fortune by which the success was won. But the effect of that emphasis was to slight the story of Omaha as an epic human tragedy which, in the early hours, came close to total disaster. The passing of the years has further tended to obscure the memory of shocking losses, failures and chaos in the Omaha landings that were the anguished prelude to victory. On this two-division-front landing, only six rifle companies were relatively effective as units. They did better than others mainly because they had the luck to touch down on a less deadly section of the beach. Three times that number were shattered or foundered before they could begin to fight. Several units did not contribute a man or a bullet to the actual battle for the high ground, the steeply graded and heavily fortified bluff beyond a strip of sand which was fifty to 300 yards wide. The ordeal of these ill-fated companies, the more wretched and blood-chilling individual experiences, were largely overlooked or toned down in the official accounts. In most of what has been written about Omaha there is less blood and iron and death than in the original field notes on battalion landings in the first wave. My own fading Normandy notebook, which covers the landing of every Omaha company, leaves little doubt on this score. Let's follow along with the Able and Baker Companies, 116th Infantry, 29th Division, as recorded in my notes...