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surrounded by trenches. ‘No one had weapons which would function,’ he reported, so they dropped into the trenches to clean them. They cleared the house, even though the staircase had been destroyed by the shelling. Once it was secure, Bingham led his men straight up the bluff to their front. They pushed inland another 400 yards, then turned west towards Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, but encountered a German strongpoint in a farmhouse on the edge of the village. Captain Cawthorn, in battalion headquarters, was shouting an order when a piece of shrapnel hit him. It entered one cheek and went out the other without damaging his jaws, purely because his mouth was open at the moment of impact. An officer who arrived soon afterwards noted that ‘he spouted blood as he talked but did not seem to mind’.

The scenes of chaos on the beach and offshore had hardly improved by 09.30 hours. ‘It was just one big mass of junk, of men and materials,’ an officer reported later. There were burnt-out and still-burning vehicles, corpses, and discarded equipment scattered in all directions. Bodies continued to wash up, rolling like logs in the surf, parallel with the water’s edge. One soldier said, ‘They looked like Madame Tussaud’s. Like wax. None of it seemed real.’ The water’s edge was blocked in places by damaged and destroyed landing craft. Further out, the chaos was even greater. Colonel Benjamin B. Talley, Gerow’s assistant chief of staff, reported that the landing craft were milling around offshore like ‘a stampeded herd of cattle’. The navy could not decide which craft should go in and which should be held back. But although many unsuitable vehicles had been landed, the tank reinforcements were at last starting to make a difference, even though a number of them threw a track when manoeuvring on the beach. Replacing the track in the open under mortar and machine-gun fire required extraordinary courage.

The course of the battle against the emplacements gradually turned against the defenders. In one case combat engineers managed to place a truck loaded with TNT beside a pillbox. ‘They lit the fuse and blew it up. Going in, they found German bodies all untouched by the explosives, blood pouring out of their noses and mouths. They had been killed by concussion.’ The most effective weapons were the guns of the destroyers, eight American and three British, which sailed in parallel to the shore and dangerously close to bombard German positions. Their guns became so hot that teams of sailors had to play hoses on them to cool them down. Many soldiers on Omaha later believed, with a good deal of truth, that these front-line destroyers saved the day. Most infantry officers afterwards felt that the naval support would have been much more effective if destroyers close in had targeted strongpoints from the start, rather than battleships firing blind from a great distance.

Tanks also played an important part. One German survivor of the 2nd Battalion of the 726th Grenadier Regiment remembered the farewell message from one bunker as Shermans attacked - ‘Lebt wohl, Kameraden! ’ - ‘Farewell, comrades!’ - then the connection was broken. He also claimed that ‘the survivors of the “resistance nest” were brutally executed in defiance of the Geneva Convention, except for 66 prisoners, of whom half were wounded’.

Although there is no confirmation of this incident in any of the American accounts, there were cases of illegal killings, mainly prompted by the violence of repressed fear and a desire for revenge after so many fellow soldiers had been killed. ‘There was a German, I don’t know what his rank was, who was dying,’ wrote a reporter with the Baltimore Sun who came across this scene late in the day. ‘He was completely unconscious at the time but I remember a bunch of GIs standing around watching this guy and finally one guy just picked up his carbine and put a bullet in his head and said, “That’ll take care of the bastard”, and of course it did.’

Some American soldiers became convinced that Frenchmen and even women had taken part in the fighting on the German