D-Day Hour by Hour, From Midnight to Nightfall

At sixteen minutes past midnight on June 6, 1944, a Horsa glider carrying thirty-odd British infantrymen came out of the dark over Normandy with no engine, no lights and no second chance. Staff Sergeant Jim Wallwork put it down in a field beside the Caen canal bridge, tore off the wheels on the wire, and slammed the nose into the embankment about fifty yards from the target. He went through the cockpit windshield still strapped to his seat.

That's how the invasion of Europe started. Not with a bugle. With a controlled crash.

0016 Hours. Two bridges in ten minutes

Major John Howard's D Company of the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry had trained for one job: seize the bridges over the Caen canal and the Orne river before the Germans could blow them, so the seaborne troops landing at dawn wouldn't be cut off from the eastern flank.

Six gliders went in. Five landed where they were supposed to. The bridges were in British hands inside ten minutes.

Lieutenant Den Brotheridge led the charge across the canal bridge and took a burst in the neck. He's generally recorded as the first Allied soldier killed by enemy fire on D-Day, and he never knew the assault worked.

0100 to 0400. The scattered drop

The American airborne plan looked clean on the map. It didn't survive contact with cloud banks, flak and a lot of very nervous transport pilots.

The 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions jumped into a peninsula the Germans had deliberately flooded. Men went into water with 100 pounds of gear and drowned in fields that had been pasture a year earlier. Sticks landed miles from their drop zones. Officers found themselves commanding whoever happened to be standing next to them in the hedgerow, from whatever regiment.

At Sainte-Mère-Église a burning building lit up the square while paratroopers came down into it. Private John Steele's canopy snagged on the church tower and left him hanging off the roof, playing dead, listening to the church bell ring a few feet from his head. He survived. The town was in American hands by around 0430, the first in France liberated.

Chaos helped in one strange way. The German command couldn't read the drop pattern, because there wasn't one. Reports of Americans came in from everywhere at once.

0445. Otway's private war

Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway was supposed to hit the Merville Battery with around 600 men, gliders landing inside the wire, and a fresh bombing run to soften it up. The bombs missed. The gliders went astray. Otway assembled roughly 150 men and almost no heavy weapons and attacked four casemates behind minefields and barbed wire anyway, because the guns were sighted on Sword Beach and men would be wading ashore there in two hours.

They took it. Then they signaled the fleet with a flare, because the alternative was watching the battleships flatten the position with British soldiers inside it.

0530. The guns open

Off the coast sat the largest amphibious fleet ever assembled, close to 7,000 vessels. Battleships that had been laid down before the First World War threw shells the size of small cars into the bluffs.

The Omaha bombing run, though, went wrong in a way that killed Americans. Heavy bombers flying through cloud delayed their release by a few seconds to avoid hitting the landing craft. Those seconds put thousands of tons of bombs into the fields behind the beach. The German defenses were untouched.

And the beach obstacles were still there. And the DD swimming tanks of the 741st Tank Battalion had just been launched about 6,000 yards out into a four-foot chop. Twenty-seven of twenty-nine sank. Crews drowned inside them.

0630. Utah and Omaha

At Utah, the current pushed the first wave roughly 2,000 yards south of where it was supposed to be. Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., 56 years old, walking with a cane, heart trouble he'd hidden from the medics, looked at the landmarks, worked out where he actually was, and said they'd start the war from right there. He was the only general officer to land with the first wave. He redirected the follow-on landings to the new beach. Utah cost the 4th Infantry Division a fraction of what the planners feared. Roosevelt died of a heart attack in Normandy on July 12 and received the Medal of Honor.

Four miles of water away, Omaha was a slaughter.

The first wave of the 116th Infantry hit sandbars under interlocking machine gun fire from bluffs a hundred feet high. Company A of the 116th was largely made up of men from Bedford, Virginia, a town of about 3,200 people. Nineteen Bedford men were killed that morning. The telegrams reached the town weeks later, several arriving at the same drugstore on the same day.

Ramps dropped and whole boat teams went down before anyone reached dry sand. Wounded men who crawled to the waterline were drowned by the incoming tide. Engineers who were supposed to blow gaps in the obstacles lost most of their demolition teams in the first twenty minutes.

0710. The cliff at Pointe du Hoc

Lieutenant Colonel James Rudder's 2nd Ranger Battalion landed about forty minutes late at the base of a hundred-foot cliff, fired rocket-propelled grappling hooks made heavy by seawater, and climbed while Germans cut ropes and dropped grenades over the edge.

They got to the top. The six big guns were gone, pulled back and hidden.

A Ranger patrol found them in an orchard inland, unguarded, and destroyed them with thermite grenades. Then the survivors held the position against counterattacks for two days. When relief finally came, the number still able to fight had fallen to around ninety out of more than two hundred.

0800 to 1000. Off the beach

Omaha was stalled. General Omar Bradley, watching from the cruiser Augusta, seriously considered diverting the follow-up landings elsewhere.

What broke it wasn't a plan. It was junior officers and sergeants deciding that staying put was a death sentence. Colonel George Taylor of the 16th Infantry told his men that two kinds of people were staying on that beach, the dead and those who were about to be, and to get moving. Brigadier General Norman Cota walked upright through the fire and told the Rangers to lead the way. Small groups blew the wire, climbed the draws and took the bluffs from behind.

Meanwhile American and British destroyers ran in so close they scraped bottom, firing directly into the German positions over the heads of their own infantry.

0725 to 0745. Gold, Juno, Sword

The British and Canadian beaches went in later because the tide runs east along that coast. Company Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis of the Green Howards cleared two pillboxes at Gold and went back under fire for two of his men. He received the only Victoria Cross awarded for D-Day.

At Juno the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division came ashore into a seawall and a high tide covering the obstacles, took a brutal first hour at Bernières-sur-Mer, and then pushed further inland by nightfall than any other Allied force.

At Sword, Lord Lovat's commandos landed with Piper Bill Millin playing on the sand because Lovat told him the regulations against it were an English rule and didn't apply to the two of them. They fought their way to Howard's canal bridge that afternoon, and Lovat apologized for being a few minutes late.

Evening. The counterattack that turned around

The only serious German armored thrust of the day came from the 21st Panzer Division, which drove into the gap between Juno and Sword and actually reached the coast. Then, around nine o'clock, its crews looked up and saw hundreds of gliders passing overhead carrying the second lift of the British 6th Airborne. Believing they were about to be cut off, they pulled back.

Hitler had slept late. The armored reserve couldn't move without his release, and it didn't come in time. Rommel, who had insisted the battle would be decided at the waterline, was at home in Germany for his wife's birthday.

By dark, roughly 156,000 Allied troops were ashore, the five beachheads weren't yet linked, and almost none of the day's inland objectives had been taken. Caen, a D-Day target, wouldn't fall until July.

What it cost

The National D-Day Memorial Foundation's research put the confirmed Allied dead on June 6 at 4,414, with total casualties around 10,000. French civilians died too, in the thousands, under Allied bombs falling on their own towns. Historian Antony Beevor put the civilian toll for that single day at roughly 3,000.

None of it was clean. The tanks sank, the bombs missed, the paratroopers landed in the wrong parishes, and men who had never fired a shot in anger made the decisions that saved the invasion while lying face down in the shingle.

That's the part worth handing to your kids. Not the map arrows. The twenty-year-old from Bedford who stood up.