"SHOOTING AT SHADOWS"
By Greg Edwards & Mark Morrison
The Roanoke Times
June 4, 1994
The Allied forces were raging ashore along a 60-mile stretch of French coast. They came at the end of an hour-long naval bombardment at 6:30 on the U.S. beaches codenamed Utah and Omaha. Because of the difference in the tides, they landed a half hour later at the British beaches, Gold and Sword, and the Canadian beach, Juno.
Although encountering initial heavy resistance and logistical problems, the British and Canadians moved well inland by nightfall of the first day.
The current carried the U.S. 4th Division landing on Utah Beach well south of its target, but that worked out when it encountered light German resistance at the start. The enemy force defending Utah beach surrendered within three hours. Roughly 23,000 troops landed on the beach at a cost of 197 casualties for the day.
It was at Omaha that things went terribly wrong, so wrong that Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley, commander of the 1st Army and the two American landings, considered withdrawing from Omaha and diverting the forces intended there to Utah Beach.
.....
Joe Comer waited.
Click, click came the response. In a few minutes, a few dozen paratroopers grouped together in the dark and started creeping the 100 yards toward town. "Like a cat sneaking up on a bird."
Closer in, they became more jumpy, shooting at shadows. "You were just shooting more or less at sounds or what you thought was there." The Germans started firing back. Comer heard the bullets whiz past him.
The fighting lasted a few hours, until dawn when Sainte-Mere-Eglise fell, distinguishing it as the first French town to be liberated. The townspeople rejoiced, bringing out wine to offer the paratroopers, almost before the retreating Germans were out of earshot.
The paratroopers offered up chocolate bars for the children.
Dangling from a church, a paratrooper whose chute had hooked onto the steeple shouted to the people below. He had played dead during the fighting; like the town, he would become a historical footnote to the invasion.
Nearly 20,000 paratroopers and glider troops dropped into Normandy. Although many missed their drop zoned and casualties were heavy, the airborne units proved effective. They fought in Normandy for more than a month.
Comer was not wounded in that month. He spent the rest of D-Day digging foxholes around Sainte-Mere-Eglise and readying for a counterattack. He knew from previous missions in Italy and Sicily that the Germans would be back.
He just hoped that reinforcements would arrive before then.
Comer didn't know what was happening on the beach. more
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