MAN ON A MISSION
When Brigadier General Norman “Dutch” Cota landed on Omaha Beach at 7:25 a.m. on June 6, 1944, he saw death, destruction, and defeat. From the bluffs overlooking the shore, German machine guns and rifles raked the beach, and artillery and mortar shells added to the mayhem. Dead and wounded American soldiers lay sprawled on the sand and floating in the water. Discarded weapons, life vests, and personal effects were strewn about, and disabled tanks burned fiercely.
The dazed, dispirited, and exhausted soldiers who had made it across the beach huddled by the seawall beneath the bluffs, “inert, leaderless and almost incapable of action,” as a U.S. Army after-action report described, their weapons fouled by sand and water and their resolve shaken by the horrors they had seen. “The crusade in Europe at this point was disarmed and naked before its enemies,” Captain Charles Cawthon of the 29th Infantry Division recalled.
What Cota saw didn’t surprise him. He knew that landings rarely follow the script, and this was no ordinary landing. It was the largest, most complex invasion ever attempted and was, the planners conceded, “fraught with hazards, both in nature and magnitude.” As Cota scanned the beach, he saw that everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. He knew that it was up to him—and the men by the seawall—to somehow make the landing work.
THE ALLIES HAD BEEN PLANNING the invasion of France, dubbed Operation Overlord, for more than a year. They targeted spring of 1944 for the assault phase, Operation Neptune, choosing a 50-mile stretch of the Normandy coastline as the landing site. British and Canadian troops would assault three beaches—Juno, Sword, and Gold—while American troops would hit two to their west, Utah and Omaha.
Four-mile-long Omaha Beach, also known as Beach 46, shaped up as the toughest nut to crack. Its terrain was ideal for defense. At low tide, invading troops would have to cross 300 yards of open beach to reach the cover of a four-foot-high seawall. Steep sandy bluffs,
