Word: utah
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...suddenly appeared full of ships, some 5,000 vessels of every variety, and from the giant battleships came a deafening barrage. The Texas and Arkansas trained their 14-in. guns on German artillery batteries atop the cliffs towering over Omaha Beach; the Nevada and three cruisers pounded nearby Utah Beach. Twelve miles offshore, thousands of infantrymen scrambled down sheets of netting into the boxlike landing craft that began chugging toward the heavily mined and barricaded shore. Aboard the flagship Augusta, General Bradley stood with ears plugged by cotton and watched through binoculars as the vanguard of the 1st and 29th...
...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...
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...
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...
...Normandy for the anniversary of Dday. Liska, a native of Chicago, was a sergeant in the 4th Infantry. As a survivor he feels a debt to "the men who won the war, those who gave their lives. The rest of us didn't." Compared with Omaha, the landing at Utah was easy, but a mile or two inland Liska's unit began to take heavy casualties. The Germans had flooded a swath of fields nearly a mile wide. Liska and his men kept their sea-landing life jackets on for the first 24 hours, as they struggled through waist-high...