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

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never come up." He saw a shell hit a beached landing craft, "flames everywhere, men burning alive." And again: "Direct hit on 2½-ton truck gasoline load; another catches fire ... men's clothes on fire ... attempt to roll in sand to put out flames."

And still the Navy kept bombarding the coast. "The destroyers had run in almost to the beach and were blowing every pillbox out of the ground with their five-inch guns," wrote Ernest Hemingway, who watched from one of the landing craft. "I saw a piece of German about three feet long with an arm on it sail high up into the air in the fountaining of one shellburst. It reminded me of a scene in Petrouchka."

When General Bradley first spotted the faint shapes of his soldiers' corpses scattered along the beach, he began to fear that "our forces had suffered an irreversible catastrophe." He even considered abandoning Omaha Beach and diverting the reinforcements to Utah. But at 1:30 that afternoon he finally got a radio message that said, "Troops formerly pinned down ... advancing up heights." Later, when the "nightmare" was all over, he could only say, "Every man who set foot on Omaha Beach that day was a hero."

By the end of Dday, the Americans held the ridge of cliffs overlooking Omaha Beach, and had pushed about a mile inland. They had landed two-thirds of their forces and suffered more than 90% of their casualties there. East and west of Omaha Beach, the landings had gone much more successfully. The U.S. 4th Division had seized Utah Beach with relatively little opposition and joined forces with the paratroopers who had been dropped near Ste.-Mère-Eglise. The British and Canadians had overwhelmed their three beaches and advanced about three miles inland toward the city of Caen. All told, the Allies had landed five divisions, some 154,000 men. It was a very precarious grip on the European mainland, but for this day, it would suffice.

Victory did not come cheap. The American losses reported for that day were grievous: 1,465 killed, 3,184 wounded, 1,928 missing. The British, who never announced their losses, were estimated to have suffered 2,500 to 3,000 casualties. Canadian casualties came to 946. Total Allied casualties: about 10,000. Estimates of German casualties: 4,000 to 9,000.

If there were mistakes and failures on the Allied side, they were insignificant compared with the blunders by the Germans. Not only did Rommel spend D-day speeding through the countryside, not only had the Luftwaffe withdrawn all the planes that were needed in Normandy, but the armored regiments that should have been thrown into the defense of Omaha Beach could not move without direct orders from Hitler, and Hitler's aides refused to wake him before 9:30 a.m.

When he did get up and hear the news, he persisted in believing that the Normandy invasion was just a feint, that he still had to guard against the real invasion that would occur at Calais. Not until ten hours after the Normandy landings did the first tanks of the 21st Panzer Division go into action against the British, and the British beat them back. When Rommel finally returned to his headquarters that night, he found his chief of staff, Lieut. General Hans Speidel, listening to Wagnerian opera records. One of Rommel's aides protested, but Speidel coolly