Who was Taylor Fellers? And why were he and his men known as the “Suicide Wave”? Turns out they were the ones specially selected to be the very first to land on Omaha Beach.
Welcome to Season 3 of Unknown History: D-Day Stories. I'm your host, Giles Milton, and today we're talking about the most terrible—and controversial—landing to take place on D-Day.
The plight of the first wave of American troops to land on Omaha Beach has come to symbolize everything that is terrible about war.
If you’ve seen Steven Spielberg’s film, Saving Private Ryan, it's hard forget the sight of hundreds of young American soldiers being gunned down on the beach by heavily armed German defenders.
What happened to the first wave of soldiers to land on Omaha was indeed terrible, but there was a lot more to it than what you saw in the film. Here—brought to you by Unknown History—is the real story of what happened on Bloody Omaha between the hours of 6 and 7 in the morning of June 6, 1944.
Here is the real story of what happened on Bloody Omaha between the hours of 6 and 7 in the morning of June 6, 1944.
It begins not with an American, but with a Brit—a 23-year-old British sea captain named Jimmy Green. He had already spent a year escorting naval convoys through the treacherous seas of the North Atlantic and a further year working with the British commandos and the American Rangers.
Now, he was entrusted with ferrying the first wave of American troops to Omaha Beach. It was all part of the Anglo-American cooperation on D-Day that often gets overlooked.
Jimmy Green had been most impressed by the American Rangers, but he felt rather less confident when he met the young lads of A Company, 116th Infantry—the ones due to be the very first on the beach.
They were, he said, “a friendly but shy bunch of fresh-faced country lads who must have felt at home in Ivybridge, Devon, where they had trained for the invasion."
He found them polite and kindly—a group of helpful young men who were used to running errands for the elderly in their home towns. But they were entirely lacking the warlike spirit of the Rangers.
They were a tightly-knit band who had trained together for more than a year...30 of them came from the same hometown of Bedford, Virginia.
Their leader was a clean-shaven young man named Taylor Fellers, a construction foreman in his previous life, who was the sort of community mainstay that could be found in any number of towns in the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia.
Jimmy Green found him “a very serious, thoughtful officer who seemed a lot older...
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