Summary: Timeline Of D-Day

Six O’clock, June six, 1944 on a beach in northern France, all is still and peaceful.(Ambrose.323) Toward the English Channel there is a faint outline of numerous vessels approaching. The tide is down, so beach obstacles can be seen, they are there to prevent any ship from landing at high tide.Small concrete outpost dot the beach and seventy-five and eighty-eight-millimeter gun batteries enclosed in huge concrete bunkers line the top of the sea wall(pg. 322). The Nazi defenders, many of the Polish or Czech, shiver by their guns as the landing craft approaches. When the first boats’ ramps drop, mortars, machine gun small arms and artillery fire, devastating the American ranks, yet they still run forward(pg. 335). This was the first wave on

The weather was foul so the Nazi commanders said the invasion would not come for at that day or the next(Ambrose.184). After a naval bombardment of the beach and bombings that were far of target the first wave of infantry in LCAs (landing craft, assault) sped toward the deadly beaches(pg. 323). On D-Day, H-Hour, nine companies from the 166th and 16th regiments charged the beach(pg. 332-333). The seasick and exhausted troops waded toward the beach only to find that they landed far off target(pg. 325). Artillery shells rained down on the LCAs sinking many of them, a wall of machine gun fire pinned down almost any advance(pg. 354). Soon the water was heavily littered with the dead as Nazi fire targeted officers and the higher ranks(pg. 327). Then, junior officers started encouraging others to push forward toward the sea wall(pg. 342). With many casualties, the front lines scrambled toward the sea wall, where they were under less fire. The paths leading up to the bunkers and pillboxes were liberally decorated with mines and threatening barbed wire(pg. 345). Yet through trial and error, small groups climbed up the bluff and started one by one taking out the deadly pill boxes(pg. 358). Ernest Hemingway, who was a correspondent for Collier’s, described it as "Slowly, laboriously, as though they were Atlas carrying the world on their shoulders, men were [climbing]. They were not firing. They were just moving slowly... like a tired pack train at the end of the day, going the other way from home(pg.