courtesy: National Archives

June 6, 1944

Eastern Shore native and 115^th Infantry Regiment D-Day survivor Jimmy Ewing:

“The 116^th (another 29^th Infantry Division regiment who had trained with the 115^th in Scotland), out of the Virginia National Guard, were in the initial assault.

“If you’ve seen movies like The Longest Day, Saving Private Ryan, they’re pretty accurate (depicting) what they did (at Omaha Beach in Normandy). They were pinned down, slaughtered. It was bad.  The Germans were dug in, had fortifications, machine guns, light artillery. (The first wave of forces) were sitting ducks.

“But they got a foothold.”

Operation Overlord, the official codename for the Invasion of Normandy, began with the landing of a large number of attack transports and the first soldiers of the 116th Infantry storming the beach at 0630. The catastrophic losses suffered by that regiment’s community on that fateful morning led to…