Destination Normandy ― Three American Regiments on D-Day

Bennett collects oral histories from men of three United States regiments that participated in the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. The 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment was the most widely scattered of the American parachute infantry regiments to be dropped on D-Day. However, the efforts of 180 men to stop the advance of an SS Panzer Grenadier division largely have been ignored outside of France. The 116th Infantry Regiment received the highest number of casualties on Omaha Beach of any Allied unit on D-Day. Stationed in England through most of the war, it had been the butt of jokes while other regiments did the fighting and dying in North Africa and the Mediterranean; that changed on June 6, 1944. And the 22nd Infantry Regiment, a unit that had fought in almost every campaign waged by the U.S. Army since 1812, came ashore on Utah Beach quite easily before getting embroiled in a series of savage fights to cross the marshland behind the beach and to capture the German heavy batteries to the north.

G. H. Bennett is Head of Humanities at the University of Plymouth, UK. He is the author or co-author of eight books, includingHitler's Admirals (2004), with R. Bennett, The Roosevelt Peacetime Administrations, 1933-1941: A Documentary History ( 2004), andAn American Regiment in Devon: The 116th Infantry Regiment, Omaha Beach and the Photography of Olin Dows (2003).