The inter war years found the Regiment headquartered at Ft. Niagara, NY. It was detached from the First Division on Oct 16, 1939, and assigned to the Eighth Division on June 22, 1940.

The 28th Infantry again distinguished itself in combat during WWII. After landing on Utah Beach on July 4, 1944, its first action was an attack to the south to establish a critical bridgehead over the Ay River so that armored divisions could launch a breakout and then attack into Brittany and Northern France. The Regiment then advanced south through Avranches and Rennes and turned west into Brittany. It participated in the savage battle for Brest and then fought on the Crozon Peninsula.

In late September, the 28th moved to Luxembourg and assumed its sector of the 8th Inf Div front which stretched along the Our River. In mid-November, the Regiment relieved elements of the 109th Infantry in the area southeast of Aachen. The next several weeks were spent attacking through the dense, forbidding Huertgen Forest, where deep mud, bitter cold, snow, enemy artillery and mines, and fierce enemy resistance caused numerous casualties in the worst fighting the Regiment was to experience.

The Regiment successfully conducted an assault crossing of the flood-swollen Roer River in late February. It then seized the town of Stockheim and continued the attack, seizing dozens of strongly defended enemy towns, until it reached the Rhine River.

In mid-April the 28th Infantry drove north as part of the campaign to destroy or capture all enemy forces trapped in the Ruhr-Sieg pocket. After a brief period of occupation duty in the Ruhr-Rhine area, the Regiment was ordered to cross the Elbe and advance toward the Baltic Sea. The final days of the war for the Regiment were spent managing huge numbers of Wehrmacht POWs, refugees and former prisoners of the Germans.

During its eleven months of combat, the Regiment played a major part in four allied campaigns - winning three Presidential Unit Citations embroidered Normandy, Bergstein and Stockheim. It suffered over 4,300 total casualties and captured more than 115,000 prisoners of war and vast stores of enemy material.

The Regiment was inactive from 1945 until 1950.

A great invasion force stood off the Normandy coast of France as dawn broke on 6 June 1944: 9 battleships, 23 cruisers, 104 destroyers, and 71 large landing craft of various descriptions as well as troop transports, mine sweepers, and merchantmen—in all, nearly 5,000 ships of every type, the largest armada ever assembled. The naval bombardment that began at 0550 that morning detonated large minefields along the shoreline and destroyed a number of the enemy’s defensive positions. To one correspondent, reporting from the deck of the cruiser HMS Hillary, it sounded like “the rhythmic beating of a gigantic drum” all along the coast. In the hours following the bombardment, more than 100,000 fighting men swept ashore to begin one of the epic assaults of history, a “mighty endeavor,” as President Franklin D. Roosevelt described it to the American people, “to preserve. . . our civilization and to set free a suffering humanity.”

Northern France
25 July - 14 September 1944

As July 1944 entered its final week, Allied forces in Normandy faced, at least on the surface, a most discouraging situation. In the east, near Caen, the British and Canadians were making little progress against fierce German resistance. In the west, American troops were bogged down in the Norman hedgerows. These massive, square walls of earth, five feet high and topped by hedges, had been used by local farmers over the centuries to divide their fields and protect their crops and cattle from strong ocean winds. The Germans had turned these embankments into fortresses, canalizing the American advance into narrow channels, which were easily covered by antitank weapons and machine guns. The stubborn defenders were also aided by some of the worst weather seen in Normandy since the turn of the century, as incessant downpours turned country lanes into rivers of mud. By 25 July, the size of the Allied beachhead had not even come close to the dimensions that pre–D-day planners had anticipated, and the slow progress revived fears in the Allied camp of a return to the static warfare of World War I. Few would have believed that, in the space of a month and a half, Allied armies would stand triumphant at the German border.