'Around me were endless horrors'

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US veteran Robert Sales: "I never dreamed of a disaster like this"

The soldiers who landed at Omaha beach on D-Day 65 years ago were mostly American, but as the BBC's Robert Hall in Normandy reports, there is a largely untold story about British involvement.

At the Normandy American cemetery above Omaha Beach, a bugler sounded his tribute to old friends.

Close to the white crosses that mark the graves of more than 9,000 American dead, a senior representative of today's US Armed Forces stood alongside a white haired veteran wearing British campaign medals.

Jimmy Green wants future generations to remember the British role at Omaha

Jimmy Green had been a young naval sub-lieutenant when he joined the D-Day armada. Today he was here to remember the American friends he lost, and to commemorate one D-Day story that is seldom told.

Jimmy commanded a flotilla of British landing craft which carried what he calls "the suicide wave", the first US troops to reach the gently sloping sand close to the village of Vierville Sur Mer.

A large percentage of the 60,000 Americans had been allocated to the British crews. It was an unpleasant and dangerous journey.

The sea was choppy, and many of the young soldiers were seasick. There were sandbanks and mined underwater obstacles to negotiate.

Jimmy Green and his fellow commanders could see little of what they faced. Spray and smoke hid the German positions sited on rising ground beyond the beach.

It was only when the ramps dropped, and the soldiers began struggling ashore that the machine guns opened up, claiming hundreds of dead and injured within the first hour.

Soldiers had to run across open sand to reach protection from gunfire

Bill Mead, in the bows of a second British craft says it was "a sorry sight". US soldiers weighted down by heavy equipment were unable to reach the sand, and dozens of bodies floated in the shallows.

"I could hear men calling 'help me sailor' but we had to turn back for more troops. I couldn't do anything for the men in trouble. Many of them drowned."

Bob Sales was one of those who made it ashore. He remembers seeing friends falling around him.

"I saw a wall at the top of the beach, and I began crawling towards it. Around me were endless horrors - men wounded, men killed, body parts. I can't begin the describe the horrors I saw that hour, that day."

In some cases the British crews lost every one of the Americans they had carried to Omaha.

In a corner of the cemetery Jimmy Green found two names he recognised, and laid flowers beside the white marble crosses.

"Over the years, history has forgotten that we British were there, and that we lost friends too," he told me: "I just want future generations to remember our role, and the fact that we got the job done."