Up Omaha Beach

Omaha was the hardest of the five D-Day beaches. Six miles of sand backed by a shingle bank, a seawall and bluffs a hundred feet high, with German positions dug into the draws. The 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions landed there at 6:30 on the morning of June 6, 1944.

The preliminary bombing had fallen inland. The tide was coming in over the obstacles, the amphibious tanks had mostly foundered, and the first waves came ashore under machine-gun and mortar fire with several hundred yards of open beach in front of them.

By nightfall the beachhead was barely a mile deep and had cost roughly 2,400 American casualties. It held. The men in this painting are still in the surf, and still moving.

Four soldiers come straight at the viewer through knee-deep water, rifles held high, faces set. Behind them the beach fills with more men, landing craft with their ramps down, steel obstacles and columns of spray where shells land. Tracer marks streak in from the right. The palette is almost monochrome — gray water, gray sky, mud — so the small warm notes of skin and wet wood stand out. The eye goes to the lead man's face and then over his shoulder to how far the boats are.