2,000+ US servicemen killed at Omaha beach

MICHAEL French’s recent letter regarding the Slapton Sands tragedy came as a surprise to us, as he mentioned in conclusion to his commentary on the Slapton Sands training and rehearsal tragedy that... “At the actual Omaha landings, 179 were killed”.

Perhaps he was referring to the landing at the neighboring Pointe du Hoc headland, where Col James Rudder scaled the 90-ft cliffs with

200 men and with over a 50% casualty rate enabled the silencing of the 75mm howitzers that were bombarding the Omaha beachhead.

In any event, something is badly wrong with Mr French’s statement, because the D-Day landing at Omaha beach was a bloody battle that almost ended in disaster, with well over 2,000 US servicemen killed and a total of over 5,000 casualties. Such was the violence of the carnage that the true figures will never be known, yet despite all these casualties it has evidently been forgotten that America gave its heart’s blood at Omaha beach to help Britain overcome a European despot.

Trying to trace the lines of responsibility and the decisions that were made in the Wehrmacht in the opening months of 1944, following Erwin Rommel’s appointment as Inspector of Defenses for Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, proves to be a difficult task. Rommel himself was a firm believer in repelling the allied invasion at its very inception, however he had limited powers in putting his ideas into action.

Partly in an effort to enable Von Rundstedt to influence Hitler more effectively, Rommel had an active intelligence operation of his own and this may have alerted him to the similarities between the Slapton seashore and the Normandy beach that lay to the Northwest of Bayeux.

We will never know for sure, but it seems very likely that the Slapton Sands training disasters whose events were partially tracked by German E Boats, put the Wehrmacht’s defenses at Pointe du Hoc and the neighboring bay to the East on high alert.

Many mistakes are made in the fog of war and many heroic actions have occurred in recovering from them. On both sides of the Atlantic, upon this 80th anniversary of American efforts to help Britain breach Hitler’s defenses and invade Europe in 1944, let us be profoundly grateful for what our young servicemen did and let us be sure that their sacrifice was not made in vain.

Anthony F Jones Monahans, Texas, USA