Omaha Beach
June 6, 1944

When elements of the U.S. 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions landed on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, they entered a death trap. The Americans expected to roll over aging reservists with no stomach for a fight, but they slammed into the 916th Grenadier Regiment, a component of the 352nd Division. Not only was the 916th Regiment filled with seasoned veterans of the savage fighting on the Eastern Front, but also these men were well prepared to meet the American invaders.

Beginning at the foot of the bluff that overlooked the landing zone, the Germans placed three lines of trenches filled with riflemen and machine gunners. In addition, they dotted the slopes leading from the beach and the plateau beyond with circular holes called "Tobruks." Each Tobruk was lined with concrete and could contain a machine gun crew, a mortar crew, and even the turret of an obsolete tank. Many of these miniature strong points were connected by underground tunnels, which allowed hard-pressed machine gunners and mortar operators to displace and return to action in a safer position.

Of all the weapons that the 916th Regiment employed at "Bloody" Omaha, none inflicted greater damage than the 81mm schwere Granatwerfer 34 (sGrW 34), the German Army's standard medium mortar. The sGrW 34 weighed about 125 pounds in action and fired high explosive, illuminating, and smoke grenades. The weapon could hurl a projectile weighing nearly eight pounds more than 2,400 yards, although its optimal range was 437 to 1,640 yards. A three-man crew could assemble an sGrW 34 in three minutes, and fire it at a rate of fourteen rounds a minute. A grenade took twenty-six seconds to reach its target, which meant that a well-trained team could have as many as six or seven grenades in the air at the same time, all of them falling within thirty seconds on an unsuspecting enemy. Exploding grenades spread their deadly splinters in circles up to thirty-three yards in diameter.

At the beginning of World War II, a German infantry division contained fifty-four sGrW 34s, eighteen per infantry regiment and six per infantry battalion. Under the reorganization implemented in late 1943, the number of sGrW 34s climbed to seventy-two per division. Allied foot soldiers came to loathe that weapon, as it may have killed more of them than any other in the Wehrmacht's arsenal. As the 29th Division's 116th Regimental Combat team approached Omaha Beach, a German mortar crew scored four direct hits on a landing craft, causing it to disintegrate and take the shredded remains of thirty-two G.I.s to the bottom of the English Channel.

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