D-Day: Every Man Was a Hero A Military Gamble that Shaped History

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tanks stuck out of the water and offered me my next cover ... Between floating bodies I reached it, paused for a few more pictures and gathered my guts for the last jump to the beach..."

Lieut. Edward Tidrick was hit in the throat when he jumped into the water. Another bullet hit him as he lay on the beach. He gasped out a last command: "Advance with the wire cutters!" There were no wire cutters; they had been lost in the blood-streaked water.

Everywhere there were noise, explosions, gunfire and wrenching cries for help. "Medico! Medico! I'm hit! Help me!" Aboard one landing craft, a German shell struck a flamethrower strapped to one soldier's back. The explosion set the whole landing craft on fire, and it burned all day long, the fire punctuated by explosions from the craft's ammunition supply.

Captain Charles Cawthon of the 29th Division managed to reach cover under the embankment at the far end of Omaha Beach, and there he found that his gun was clogged with salt water and sand. "The embankment was strewn with rifles, Browning automatics and light machine guns, all similarly fouled," he recalled. "Except for one tank that was blasting away from the sand toward the exit road, the crusade in Europe at this point was disarmed and naked before its enemies."

Several officers desperately tried to move their pinned-down men off the beach. But there were only four heavily defended exit roads and the bluffs ahead. "They're murdering us here!" cried Colonel Charles D. Canham, commander of the 116th Regiment, a blood-soaked handkerchief around his wounded wrist. "Let's move inland and get murdered."

Brigadier General Norman ("Dutch") Cota, assistant commander of the 29th Division, waved his .45 pistol as he strode heedlessly through the gunfire. When he found a cluster of soldiers in the shelter of the embankment, he asked them who they were. They said they were Rangers. "Then, goddammit," said the general, "if you're Rangers, get up and lead the way." They did. Under the cover of a brushfire that had been started by the Navy shelling, 35 men managed to scale the bluffs and get behind the German gun positions.

Another unit of 225 Rangers under Lieut. Colonel James Rudder was dispatched to Pointe du Hoc, a 100-foot-high promontory four miles west of Omaha and ten miles east of Utah. Their assignment: to knock out six heavily defended German 155-mm guns that could command both beaches. They fired rocket-propelled grappling hooks up to the top of the cliff and then began the fearful climb up ropes and ladders. The Germans splattered the oncoming Rangers with machine-gun fire, grenades, even boulders, and they managed to cut several of the ropes on which the Rangers were inching upward. By the time Rudder's men had seized the cratered cliff (and radioed back, "Praise the Lord"), only 90 of the 225 could still bear arms. And the German guns they had fought to capture they found hidden in an orchard a mile away, apparently moved as a result of earlier air raids.

The ships, meanwhile, kept ferrying in more troops, more guns, more supplies. Major Stanley Bach of the 1st Infantry Division managed to scribble a few notes: he saw a landing craft hit three mines. "Navy men go flying through the air into the water. They