Destination Normandy: Three American Regiments on D-DayBennett collects oral histories from men of three United States regiments that participated in the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. The 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment was the most widely scattered of the American parachute infantry regiments to be dropped on D-Day. However, the efforts of 180 men to stop the advance of an SS Panzer Grenadier division largely have been ignored outside of France. The 116th Infantry Regiment received the highest number of casualties on Omaha Beach of any Allied unit on D-Day. Stationed in England through most of the war, it had been the butt of jokes while other regiments did the fighting and dying in North Africa and the Mediterranean; that changed on June 6, 1944. And the 22nd Infantry Regiment, a unit that had fought in almost every campaign waged by the U.S. Army since 1812, came ashore on Utah Beach quite easily before getting embroiled in a series of savage fights to cross the marshland behind the beach and to capture the German heavy batteries to the north. |
From inside the book
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... Europe is a very remote one— -the pos- sibility of our fighting our way through Germany to Berlin - well beyond the realms of possibility.1 These dark diary thoughts voiced on the eve of the invasion of Europe belonged not to a soldier ...
... Europe had been underway since 1942 , but by mid - 1944 many civilians wondered , despite the preparations , whether the invasion would ever be launched . The extent to which the generals , and the large numbers of untried British ...
... Europe shared a common mind - set . They believed in their country and wished to restore their American values to the European continent . The intricacies of Nazi- ism and Italian fascism were lost on most of them , although the ...
Contents
Operation Bolero and the Clash of Cultures | 1 |
Three Regiments and the Mind of the | 7 |
Early Training and the Buildup to June 6 1944 | 19 |
Copyright | |
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