When landing craft 88 beached, Joe Vaghi was the second man down the ramp. The first was a Coast Guardsman in bathing trunks and a helmet. He jumped into the sea to string a line for men to hold onto as they waded in. A German artillery shell hit him, and according to a witness he "disintegrated." Men of the Sixth Naval Beach Battalion—they called themselves "fighting sons of beaches"—began to charge down ramps lowered from both sides of the bow. Another German shell smashed into the starboard ramp, killing two more Coast Guardsmen.

German Pfc. Hein Severloh was crouching behind a machine gun at Widerstandsnest 62 and watching rows of men on the ramps of a landing craft. "My order," he recalls, "was to get them when they were still in one line, one after the other, before they started spreading. So I did not have to swing my gun sideways." Severloh later wrote that he saw "how the water sprayed up where my machine gun bursts landed, and when the small fountains came closer to the GIs, they threw themselves down. . . . Very soon the first bodies were drifting in the waves of the rising tide. . . . In a short time, all GIs down there were shot."

Severloh estimates that he fired 12,000 rounds from his machine gun and 400 from his carbine. But the Americans kept coming, and at the end of the day, Severloh surrendered, hoping the Americans would not know he was the German who had fired what was probably the deadliest machine gun on Omaha Beach. Sometime that day, Sgt. Valentin Lehrmann died gazing at a picture of his wife. By late afternoon Widerstandsnest 62 was empty, all its men dead, wounded, captured, or running for their lives.

In the sea, men also died. As another landing craft, 85, beached at Easy Red and struck a mine, German machine guns and artillery zeroed in. "The shells tore into the troop compartments. They smashed through massed men trying to get down the ramp," the captain later reported. Ablaze and riddled, she backed off the beach, carrying a cargo of dead and wounded. Her crew transferred all able-bodied survivors to other landing craft heading for Omaha. Her doctor helped with casualties, then boarded a boat for the beach to tend to those dying in the surf and on the sand.

What scenes we know on Bloody Omaha live on in the memories of men like Joe Vaghi—the brave but unsung troops who soldiered on and won the war, along with the forgotten sons of beaches who were both sailors and soldiers.

There is also the scene recorded by one of the BIGOT artists, Lt. William Bostick. On June 7, the day after, he walked the shore he'd seen for months in his imagination and watched soldiers digging temporary graves for bodies carried up from the sands. Then he drew one more sketch, a study in pen and ink that rendered the high price of human liberty. He titled it, "Burying the Dead on Omaha Beach."