"At 0200 on the morning of 7th June, 25th SS Panzer-Grenadier Regiment attacked. Artillery fell onto both the Vierville and Les Moulins draws, severing the troops inland from their lifeline to the beach. The Jagdpanzers fired their high velocity 75mms straight down the roads leading into the American positions and raced forward, the panzer-grenadiers following in their armoured personnel carriers mixed with flak and self-propelled guns. As usual SS Standartenführer Kurt Meyer lead the attack in his favourite command vehicle, a motorcycle. Both draws had been crowded with human and soft-skinned vehicle traffic moving up from the beach. Orange bursts of exploding shells lit the draw. Within minutes it was filled with shredded corpses, twisted equipment, and burning vehicles. The fire shifted then to the beaches which were equally packed. The Germans were through the American perimeter around Vierville in the first rush. Panzermeyer was behind the first company when the Americans began to react. Tanks emerged from the darkness firing into his still mounted grenadiers. The two lead Jagdpanzers were hit from the rear by a combination of antitank guns and tanks. They began to burn. Meyer was not about to shrink back, nor were his young grenadiers. They had quickly dismounted and were attacking in the dark led by their veteran officers and NCOs. The battalions of the 915th Regiment were attacking around the perimeter as well. First Lieutenant Edward H. Lason of Charlottsville remembered: The village caught fire and the moon was out so there was plenty of light. The navy was firing illumination shells too. The Germans just kept coming. My platoon was down to seven men when they rushed us. Sergeant Collins' face disappeared. Then they were among us. I shot one, two, then felt a hammer hit my chest and blacked out. I woke later that night. The fighting had passed, and there were only dead men around. All of my seven and other young faces in those cloth-covered German helmets. The German medics found me in the morning. Slowly the Stonewallers were pressed back through Vierville towards the draw. The hedgerows thinned out here along the bluff offering no protection to the short German rushes that had moved their attack forward so far. Naval gunfire lashed with high explosive and steel splinters the open ground that the Germans could not cross. It was cold comfort for Gerhardt. His division was bleeding to death. He doubted if the Stonewallers could muster a fit battalion now. They were played out and holding on by fingernails that could only slip. The 115th was fresher but had been pushed back to the Les Moulins draw as well. Reinforcements would only bunch up on the beach. The wounded now seemed to outnumber the unwounded. He reluctantly recommended the 29th be withdrawn. General Gerow (5th corps commander) passed on the recommendation to General Bradley aboard the USS Augusta. His great jaw set, then he said, 'Stop all reinforcement. Bring them off.' To the navy's eternal credit, they did just that in the few remaining hours of darkness and the early morning. Naval gunfire kept the Germans at bay as first the wounded then the troops on the beach and finally the wasted infantry companies were one by one sent to the beach. The Germans did not cooperate. Panzermeyer's artillery and that of the 352nd continued to pound the draws and the beach adding to the butcher's bill paid by the 29th. Navy Lieutenent Jeffery Nelson was on one of the landing craft shuttling from the beach to the ships. By his third trip, the inch of water on the metal deck was pink. The wounded were being packed aboard as quickly as possible Many of them were struck by shrapnel or high explosive as they filed down the beach and carried aboard bleeding. By the seventh trip in the early morning, the water on the deck was deep red. Everything except personal weapons was ordered to be abandoned. 5th Corps Losses at Omaha Beach 6th June 1944 Unwounded POWs 8,626 Wounded POWs 2,712 Evacuated Wounded 3,391 Killed 2,311 Missing 884 Total 17,924 It had been the bloodiest day for the U.S. Army since Antietam in 1862." This dramatic account of one of the great 'what ifs' of World War II comes from: Disaster at D-Day The Germans Defeat the Allies, June 1944 by Peter Tsouras Now, for the first time, this bestselling book will be published in paperback. Disaster at D-Day presents the alternate history of the Allied D-Day landings based very firmly on fact and is a brilliant study of how a campaign could lead to unexpected results. It is June 1944. The Allied armies are poised for the full-cale invasion of Fortress Europe. Across the Channel, the vaunted Wehrmacht lies waiting for the first signs of the invasion, ready for the final battle. What happens next is well known to any student of modern history – but the outcome could have been very different, as Peter Tsouras shows in this devastating account of a D-Day in which plans, missions and landings go horribly wrong. Peter Tsouras introduces minor adjustments at the opening of the campaign – the repositioning of unit, bad weather and misjudged orders – and examines their effect as they gather momentum and impact upon all subsequent events. Without deviating from the genuine possibilities of the situation, he presents a scenario that keeps the reader guessing and changes the course of history. 'Disaster at D-Day is a great story – fun to read and as accurate as any 'real' history.' – Larry Bond 'a brilliant fantasy ... great fun. Superbly researched and imagined, Disaster at D-Day is a literary victory.' – Ralph Peters Peter Tsouras is a senior analyst at the U.S. Army National Ground Intelligence Center. His other books include Gettysburg: An Alternate History, and he contributed the chapter Operation ORIENT: Joint Axis Strategy to The Hitler Options: Alternate Decisions of World War II. He and has compiled the forthcoming monumental The Greenhill Dictionary of Military Quotations. Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 99 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com