Company L, 116th Infantry Regiment

Company L, 116th Infantry Regiment. . Mobilized on 3 February 1941 by order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, citizen-soldiers of Company L, 116th Infantry, reported to their Virginia National Guard armory at Staunton for a year's active service plus another four added by the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. By then, the company had undergone months of rigorous individual and unit training at Ft. Meade, Maryland, and continued to hone combat skills until embarking HMS Queen Mary for Great Britain in October 1942. In England, Company L spent the year and a half on land and sea preparing and rehearsing for the amphibious assault that began on 6 June 1944. With Capt. Charles East in command, the unit was one of three rifle companies in the 116th Infantry Regiment's 3rd Battalion, Lt. Col. Lawrence Meeks commanding. The 3rd Battalion's D-Day mission was to come ashore on Omaha Beach behind the 2nd Battalion, advance into the coastal village of St. Laurent-sur-Mer, and hasten inland to expand the beachhead. , , Seven landing craft, vehicle and personnel (LCVP) drawn from USS Charles Carroll grounded Company L at H+50, 0720. Second Battalion had scattered badly during landing, but Company L came ashore as an integral body, albeit a thousand yards east of its designated Easy Green sector because of a strong offshore cross-current. The debarking soldiers surged across a tidal flat diminished by the floodtide to find themselves exposed and trudging through the dry sand of an unfamiliar beach located between the D-3 and E-1 Draws. Enemy machine gun fire produced immediate casualties; worse still, mortar fire had begun to bracket the assaulting troopers. That the company would lose many more men if it failed to clear the killing zone between the sea and embankment was obvious, and its soldiers wasted no time breaching barbed wire obstacles and finding routes through the minefields between them and better fighting ground that lay beyond the steep bluffs they were ascending to reach the fields north of St. Laurent. , , Moving in a southwesterly direction, Company L worked its way around St. Laurent in early afternoon, reducing several obstinate enemy strong points in the process. Advance elements of the company pressed on across the head of the D-3 Draw toward a German rocket artillery battery, but heavy machine gun fire suspended their advance. By nightfall the company was dug in just outside St Laurent, and set to resume, at first light, the advance toward its D-Day objective. , , In recognition of its exemplary performance and fundamental contribution to victory on Omaha Beach, Company L received both the Presidential Unit Citation and the French Crois de Guerre with Palm. , , Emplaced in memory of Colonel Berkeley H. Riley, who landed on Omaha Beach on D+1 and served on the National D-Day Memorial Foundation Board of Directors, 1991-2000. Given in love by his family and friends.