Over the Shingle

At the top of Omaha Beach the sand gave way to a bank of shingle — loose stones piled by the tide, a few feet high, and behind it belts of barbed wire and a minefield. It was the only cover on the beach. On the morning of June 6, 1944, hundreds of men lay behind it, wounded, exhausted or simply unable to go on.

Staying there meant dying there. Officers and sergeants moved along the bank, engineers pushed Bangalore torpedoes under the wire and blew gaps, and small groups went through them and started up the bluffs.

Those groups were how Omaha was won. By early afternoon the first draws were open, and men were climbing the shingle instead of hiding behind it.

The shingle bank rises like a wall of gravel across the whole picture, its crest strung with wire and lit by the fires beyond. Soldiers crawl and scramble up it in a loose wedge, and one man has reached the top, silhouetted against the blast, arm raised to bring the others on. In the lower left a medic holds a wounded man; at right another has fallen backward. The tide pool at the bottom reflects the orange sky. The eye climbs with the men.