Omaha Beach

FrankKay

How Many Deaths Were Lost At Omaha Beach Normandy June 6th 1944

Stovepipe

Hi there
From what I've read and seen on various documentaries, the death total in in the order of 3000, for Omaha Beach. This is not a final figure because wounded men, who were hit on the beach, who died later, either in France or the UK or aboard naval vessels, might not have been included. You should dig up a book called the "The Bedford Boys" for personal accounts of the landing and the fighting.

regards
Stovepipe

snafuk35

Many of the men who may have survived the landing and got off the beach in one piece were by the evening of D-Day and the morning of D-Day+1 fighting it out in the hedgerows and fields with German troops. Many of them got knocked off and ended up in the same aid stations or in the same grave yards as the men who died on the beaches.

By May 1945 the 1st Infantry Division like many other divisions of the US Army in Europe were best described as three divisions in one. One division in the grave, another in the hospital and another in combat. Very few D-Day veterans were left alive or in one piece by the time the 1st Division halted at the Elbe.

The likes of Sergeant Slaughter who survived Bloody Omaha - the man was a huge lumbering giant who somehow didn't get hit! - could barely remember the faces of the men who landed with and the men who replaced them and who got killed or wounded. It all became a blur. Most of the time soldiers didn't know where they were, what was really going in the world and they didn't care because survival became their only preoccupation and longer they spent in combat the more sure they were that they would be maimed or killed.

There is no way of knowing how many were killed at Omaha. We can only guess based on some patchy records. The record is patchy because officers got their reports from subordinates who got their information from NCO's and often these men were killed or maimed too. During combat it would have been absurd for a statistician to be running around chasing down men in the foxholes or in the field hospitals or trying to find out what body fragment belonged to who.

The landing was supposed to have followed a strict schedule but we know that most of the armour went to the bottom because the DD tanks failed in the swell or were launched to far from shore. We know that with all the smoke and explosions and because they were riding low in the water that young sailors driving the Higgins boats into shore got lost or were carried by the current or became mixed up with other companies and battalions and regiments. When men got ashore after seeing comrades blasted to bits and things became crowded at the seawalls or in the dunes, they took cover from the murderous German fire with mixed up survivors, often missing their corporals, sergeants and officers and did not who the man next to them was.

The few officers or nomcoms or privates who got their act together and start getting men to blow holes in the wire and the seawall and start moving up the bluffs did not have a plan and were often not sure how many men were following them or how much ammo they had or what weapons they were carrying. When they took out pillboxes and trenches and mixed it up with German troops, they often had no idea where they were and fought entirely ad hoc engagements. Some men undoubtedly should have got the congressional medal of honor but didn't because they were killed and the people who saw them do heroic deeds were also killed.

So if someone was to try and piece together a blow by blow account of what happened, how many were killed or wounded and how things were pulled out of the fire, we really cannot know.

Truth is that we will never know for sure. We can only guess.

Stovepipe

All true but the Americans did have a good Graves Registration system and made every effort to determine the fate of their casualties. In a lot of cases, the lack of a body meant that drowned tank crews or the men lost in landing craft or simply blown apart by artillery or mines were lumped in as Missing or, in the case of tank crews, they were unidentifiable and were just listed as Unknown. Often, the final fate of Missing soldiers wasn't clarified until they were known to be listed as PoWs, via the Red Cross or were liberated at war's end, or were found to have deserted (much to the Allies' embarrassment, there were many deserters, especially around the port areas) or were notified to the Allies by civilians ( a lot of the crash sites and ad-hoc graves of dead aircrew were found this way). It wasn't an exact science but at the time, it was reasonably accurate.

regards
Stovepipe

Owryan

FrankKay wrote: »

How Many Deaths Were Lost At Omaha Beach Normandy June 6th 1944

How do you lose Deaths ??

Are you just looking for allied dead, german dead , civilian dead or a combination of all 3 ?