The First Infantry Division - better-known by its insignia as the Big Red One - was as star-crossed as any unit during World War II.

It saw combat early, in North Africa, had its likable and lenient commander replaced by the flamboyant and strict George Patton and played a major role in the Sicily campaign. As the invasion of France approached, the division thought it deserved some leave; American planners instead thought it deserved to lead.

The problem with the First was that it bore the curse of experience, which made it a logical choice to mix in with other units that had no battle experience. After months of intensive (and sometimes deadly) training in England and preparation for even the smallest details and most remote possibilities, it fell to the First to lead the assault into the slaughterhouse of Normandy's Omaha Beach.

"The planners . . . had thought of everything - everything to give the seaborne attackers every advantage," Denver author Flint Whitlock writes. "To start with, the planners had arranged for two American airborne divisions to drop behind enemy lines west of Utah Beach to seal off the beachhead from enemy intrusion and create panic. They had arranged for the sky to be filled with bombers dropping thousands of tons of bombs that would create craters in the sand to provide safe shelter while also cracking open the enemy's concrete casemates like eggs, shredding the barbed-wire entanglements, and detonating the underground minefields. They had laid on squads of demolition experts to go in at H-hour-plus-three-minutes to blow up and render harmless (German commander) Rommel's fiendishly arrayed underwater and beach obstacles. (They) had placed the artillery in amphibious DUKWs to lend fire support to the infantry the moment they hit the beach. They had converted a number of landing craft into rocket-launching platforms that would saturate the beachhead with their lethal missiles. And they had taught tanks how to swim; the entire assault was to be led by sixty-four duplex drive tanks that would add their 75mm guns to the demoralization of the enemy and lead to his swift surrender."

There was only one problem: "None of all these carefully planned and rehearsed activities even came close to working as planned."

With virtually everything else failing on a scale not even the most pessimistic could have envisioned, it was left to "the thin, wet line of khaki that dragged itself ashore" to throw themselves against Hitler's Atlantic Wall. Soldiers showed their buddies the way through minefields by using themselves as human detonators, marking a path with their corpses. Others attacked concrete pillboxes with nothing more than rifles. German defenders had so many easy targets that at one point the greatest fear they had was that they would run out of ammunition.

Yet the battle did turn, and the Americans took Omaha Beach. Whitlock follows the division beyond D-Day, although it's the subject of the majority of his effort. One of the best features of The Fighting First is that Whitlock relies largely on the words of veterans of the division to tell its story.

You come away from this book amazed and thankful that any survived to tell it.

Dan Danbom is a freelance writer living in Denver.