As soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division leaped from their landing craft into the choppy waters off Omaha Beach, many cursed the landing-craft pilots who had deposited them too far away from the invasion beach. German small-arms fire from the bluffs overlooking the approaches raked the surface of the water, while indirect artillery fire splashed amid the landing craft in the English Channel.

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On the morning of D-Day, June 6, 1944, the soldiers who headed for Omaha’s 4-mile-wide, crescent-shaped beach faced a 300-yard dash to the base of the bluffs. First the landing craft and soldiers had to make their way through a mixture of German obstacles, some of which protruded above the low tide. Halfway to the bluffs at the end of the tidal flat was a raised shingle ledge of sand and smooth stones. There the Germans had placed thick belts of barbed wire. That shingle was the first spot on the otherwise open beach to offer the troops any cover from the machine-gun fire. There was still another 100 yards to go before they reached the base of the bluffs, however, where more wire and mines awaited. As the GIs struggled across the sand, the Germans poured down a steady stream of fire from their elevated positions.

The bulk of the American infantry was held up at the shingle. Some soldiers dashed back to the water to seek shelter behind the German beach obstacles. Company A of the 29th Division’s 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment, hit the beach and drew such heavy fire that within 10 minutes it ceased to be an effective fighting force. Much of the unit’s equipment was lost in the Channel.

The ferocity of the enemy response was due primarily to the 352nd Infantry Division, one of the few full-strength German divisions in France. Whether the Allied leadership knew of its location along the coast is the subject of debate. Some sources say that its presence was a complete surprise. Others state that Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley, commander of the U.S. First Army and all U.S. ground troops during the landings, was informed of the 352nd’s relocation to Normandy, but the information came too late to alter Allied planning.

On December 14, 1941, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed Forces High Command), had given orders for the construction of defensive positions along the European coastline. Keitel directed, ‘The coastal regions of the Arctic Ocean, North Sea, and Atlantic Ocean controlled by us are ultimately to be built into a new West Wall in order that we can repel with certainty any landing attempts, even if by the strongest enemy forces, with the smallest possible number of permanently assigned field troops.’ Essentially, he was calling for a formidable outer rampart to replace the original West Wall (or Siegfried Line) bordering the German hinterland, but until the latter part of 1943 the Atlantic Wall was not much of an invasion obstacle. Bunkers and observation posts were scattered along 2,400 miles of coastline, with the heaviest emplacements around key ports and installations. Even the August 1942 raid on the French port city of Dieppe did little to increase the construction efforts of the German defenders. But by 1943, with a stalemate in Russia and the collapse of Axis dominance around the Mediterranean, German attention was finally focused on the French shores.

The coastal defensive works resembled the West Wall fortifications along the German frontier, except that Atlantic Wall casemates had wider firing embrasures to accommodate heavier guns. Responsibility for construction of the coastal forts fell to Organization Todt–a construction group that was a paramilitary arm of the Nazi regime–along with additional voluntary and forced labor. At one point, 260,000 laborers were employed in the effort. Despite the construction resources pegged for the Atlantic Wall, there were shortages of materiel–thousands of tons of concrete were diverted for building U-boat pens, static V-1 ‘buzz bomb’ launching sites and a V-2 rocket bunker. Because concrete was scarce, many Atlantic Wall emplacements were constructed without all-important reinforced roofs.

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