US 1st Infantry Division

▣ Unit · 1944 – 1944

▶ Explore on the map

The 1st Infantry Division, which had spent three years training on the Virginia coast, was chosen to take Utah Beach on D-Day because the pre-invasion planners believed the lightly defended sector west of the Cotentin would be the easiest of the five. The assault convoy reached the shore at dawn on the sixth of June 1944 some two kilometres south of the intended landing point, and the first men ashore found themselves trapped against a fire-swept beach and the loose sand of the dunes, with German positions on the bluffs above them. Casualties among the first wave were heavy, but the division's concealment of its intentions and the arrival of reinforcements before high tide carried the line inland. The 1st then held the western edge of the beachhead for the rest of June, screened the routes used by the build-up traffic, and took part in the advance that captured Cherbourg at the end of the month. In July and August it moved south through the bocage with the rest of the American sector, fighting hedgerow by hedgerow, and remained in the line around Saint-Lo when the breakout opened the route to the open country of Brittany and Avranches. The locations recorded in this entry are schematic headquarters-area positions rather than surveyed front lines.

Sources

Related

Reuse this data: open dataset (GeoJSON / CSV, CC BY 4.0)