The work described in this paper grew out of an attempt to generalize some results obtained in an earlier paper [4] on the water entry problem of a thin wedge or cone into an incompressible fluid. The object of the generalization was to include the effect of gravity terms. In most papers on hydrodynamic impact it is considered permissible to neglect this effect since gravity terms might be expected to play a minor role in the initial stages of the motion. However, it seems desirable to investigate the effect of including gravity terms in order both to examine the later stages of the motion and to estimate to what extent their neglect is justified in the early stages. It will be seen that it is possible to develop a fairly complete solution for the normal entry of a thin symmetric body, both for two-dimensional and axially symmetric cases, on the basis of a linearized theory. The restriction to a linearized theory means that the whole field of analysis associated with the theory of surface waves of small amplitude becomes available. Most of the problems considered in this paper are initial value problems in which the whole fluid is at rest at t = 0.