D-Day anniversary: The leaders of Omaha Beach

[revwardoc]

http://views.washingtonpost.com/lead...id=smartliving

By the time Brigadier General Norm Cota came ashore on Omaha Beach, an hour after the first troops, it was clear that the assault plan, more than a year in the making, was falling apart.

Lead units had suffered hundreds of casualties. Bodies rolled in the bloody surf, while more dead and wounded lay scattered amid piles of burning equipment and vehicles. GIs were packed so tightly on the sand that German defenders on the bluffs above could hardly miss. Many of those still alive were seasick or had lost their weapons in the water. Cleverly laid German defenses closed off the beach exits, which were raked with fire and blocked by mines and barbed wire.

As an experienced combat commander, Cota knew that even the best plans can fall apart; when that happens leaders on the ground have to adjust on the fly. He also knew that staying put on the beach was suicide; German mortar fire was becoming more, not less, accurate.

They could not back off the beach--there wasn't even a plan for withdrawal. The only thing left to do was to get the troops moving directly up the bluffs, right into the teeth of the German fire. There was no time to plan a large-scale assault, no practical way to communicate in any orderly fashion with commanders spread across the killing zone. The general had to show his men what he wanted.

Cota scrambled over the seawall, dodging machine gun fire, shouting encouragement and directions to the men closest to him. He showed the demolition men exactly where he wanted to blow a gap in the barbed-wire barrier guarding the foot of the cliff. When the detonation tore a hole in the obstacle, Cota was one of the first men through the gap.
Several men following were killed, but a determined few made it inside this first line of enemy defenses. Others nearby, inspired by the general's example, fought off the shock and pushed past their wounded and dying comrades. Energized and angry, GIs clambered up to positions from which they could shoot the German defenders.

Nearby, Major Sidney Bingham, who started June 6 in command of more than 600 combat soldiers, was now leading fewer than 30 up the cliff. Later, Bingham said, "Individual and small-unit initiative carried the day."

At other points on the beach a few privates and sergeants and lieutenants, though cut off by noise and smoke and stunned by the carnage around them, did what Cota and Bingham did. They took charge of their own little sectors of the war--just that area around them they could see and influence by direct action. On England's green training fields they'd been taught to act rather than wait to be told what to do. They remembered that lesson even as they stepped into bloody hell at Omaha Beach.

The Allies put some 156,000 men ashore in France on D-Day. Many of these men thought of themselves as followers before that day; some of those became leaders after the shooting started on June 6, at exactly the moment when the Allied war effort needed them to step up and take charge.