Audie Murphy looks nervously around the landing craft. The American sergeant is part of the first wave of attacks that must take the beach between Saint-Tropez and Cavalier on the French Riviera on August 15, 1944.
Murphy knows it as Alpha Beach, because just as on D-Day 70 days earlier, the landing beaches were given code names that did not indicate where they were located.
Murphy is nervous, and so are the other soldiers in his unit. The sergeant thinks they look like drowned cats. Although the sea is calm, most of them look seasick. They know that the risk of being killed or injured is great when they reach the beach and the ship's hatch is lowered.
Then there is a scream in the sky above Murphy. American and British ships fire thousands of missiles that are heading for Alpha Beach. They explode in the distance. German barbed wire fences and beach mines are blown to smithereens.
A few minutes later, Murphy and his men waded ashore. From the hills behind the beach, the Germans opened fire with machine guns and mortars.
“There is an explosion to my left. When the smoke clears, I see the mutilated body of a man who has stepped on a mine. A medic bends over him, but he quickly gets up and signals to the stretcher bearers that they can do nothing for him,” Murphy wrote in his autobiography.
With 150,000 other Allied troops, he must chase the Germans off the southern coast of France, capture the important ports of Marseille and Toulon and then advance north.
This action was called “Operation Dragon” and was crucial to the victory over Nazi Germany. In many ways, the invasion was larger than D-Day, but the second Allied landing in France has been largely forgotten.
