"LIKE A SHOOTING GALLERY"
By Greg Edwards & Mark Morrison
The Roanoke Times
June 4, 1994
John Talton clutched two satchels of explosives and ran for his life into the surf.
With his first step, he sank over his head. He sank right behind Leo Dombroski, who was struggling to inflate his preserver under the tide and anchoring weight of the 60-pound pack on his back, the same kind of pack they all carried.
Talton, a good swimmer from his boyhood on the North Carolina shore, ditched the satchels, fought through the current and inflated Dombroski's preserver. Dombroski dog-paddled to the surface. Talton inflated his preserver and followed.
Others were in trouble.
Two men who had jumped from the boat were being swept into deeper water. Wounded, they were holding to each other, yelling for help. Talton had been warned not to go back for the wounded. It would only get himself wounded or killed, he'd been told.
Talton's conscience got ahead of his training.
He dragged the two men behind a sandbar where Dombroski was taking cover. The barrage of gunfire grew heavier. They were pinned down, useless.
A short distance away, a burning tank that had come in on another boat spewed black smoke. The tank was supposed to have provided the demolition unit with protection as the group worked to clear the beach.
As the dawn brightened into morning, the beach stood untouched. The shore was as strong and as fortified as before; for the coming waves of men and machinery there wouldn't be any of the 50-yard gaps that had been promised.
Instead, they would be met like easy targets at a shooting gallery.
.....
In all, 150,000 Allied soldiers were to enter France during the invasion's first 48 hours. The heaviest casualties were among the paratroopers and glider troops who dropped in the night and the units of the 29th and lst divisions that debarked on Omaha Beach.
Of the five invasion beaches, Omaha was the toughest. In the first four days, the lst suffered 1,638 casualties, including 124 killed and 432 missing. The 29th reported losses totaling 2,210, including 280 killed and 896 missing in action.
Back in Virginia there was particular interest in the fate of the 29th, made up of former National Guard units from Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and Washington, D.C. The division's nickname was the Blue and Gray, an allusion to the different sides its various units had fought on in an earlier war.
The division's 116th Infantry Regiment had a history going back to George Washington and "Stonewall" Jackson. The companies of the 116th came from western and central Virginia, from Martinsville to Winchester and Emporia to Wytheville.
The first and second battalions of the 116th Regimental Combat Team led the assault on the west side of six-mile wide Omaha Beach. Company A of Bedford, E of Chase City, F of South Boston and G of Farmville crouched in the first wave of assault boats to hit the sands at 6:30 a.m.
Company A and a company from the 2nd Ranger Battalion on the far western side of the beach landed in the worst of the killing zone. When the day was done, 91 of 200 men in Company A were dead; of the survivors, only 15 were not wounded. Nineteen of the dead were from Bedford County. Overall, the 29th suffered 1,000 casualties on D-Day, 850 from the 116th Infantry. more...
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