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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

Now that's an exaggerated title. The headline on the page has "74 Years Ago, a Brilliant Invention Decided When D-Day Would Occur" not "Decided Normandy's Fate". I was under the impression that hundreds of thousands of people fought in that battle? Did they not influence the outcome somewhat?

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One could argue that what really decided Normandy's fate, and the fate of all of occupied France, was Operation Bagration, the real gut-punch that smashed the Wehrmacht and broke them, hundreds of miles to the east.

The scale and savagery of war on the eastern front is so mind boggingly incomprehensible, and relatively unknown for an English-speaking audience. If you have not, I highly recommend Dan Carlin's Ghosts of the Ostfront series of podcasts, to get even a sense of the insanity.

The western front was, in totality, almost a sideshow in comparison to the titanic, inhuman struggle raging from Black to Baltic seas.

The same goes for WWI. I'm not downplaying the horrors and scale of the Marne, Somme and Aisne, but the siege of Przemyśl, the battle of Lemberg were comparable yet not nearly as infamous.

When we think of WWI we think of the trenches in Belgium and northern France. Sure, Belgium was hit pretty hard (120,000 casualties, about 1,7% of population) but compare that to Serbia: 1 million casualties, a staggering 25% of population... and most people don't even realize that Serbia was affected by the war in the first place.

The austro-hungarian war, and its futility is also incredible - I don't have the title now, but I've read something outlining their mobilization plan up to Tannenberg. The whole Balkans region that started the conflagration is so confusing and bloody...

> mind boggingly incomprehensible

Absolutely agree.

I strongly recommend this interactive illustration of the casualties of ww2, which really drives home the scale of this catastrophe.

[1] http://www.fallen.io/ww2/

1.5 million troops (not even counting civilians) died at the siege of Leningrad. One million at the battle of Stalingrad.

To most people, "Kursk" is the name of a submarine but it is also the biggest tanks battle of the history of mankind, and the point where USSR made the tide turn in favor of the allies. This battle alone saw more death than the campaign of Normandy.

It is funny how these things work. We tend to put an heroic filter on the Allies' operation on the D-Day and trivialize the French defense in 1940 as a buffoonery despite both having a similar death toll. And we ignore the big battles that bled to death the USSR and that actually won the war.

One can't understand stalinism and the Russian brand of nationalism without knowing that history.

> I highly recommend Dan Carlin's Ghosts of the Ostfront series of podcasts, to get even a sense of the insanity.

Just don't take any factual claims Carlin makes as fact. He is a storyteller, not a historian. He editorializes his stories a lot.

> The scale and savagery of war on the eastern front is so mind boggingly incomprehensible

Logistic and thought behind the D-Day is also mind-boggingly incomprehensible.

Can we stop glorifying Stalin's butchery, please? Yes, they've managed to lose 10 times more soldiers than British and US combined and suffered enormous loss of civilian lives.

But you know why? Because Communist leaders had no respect for human lives.

Maybe they meant "Decided Normandy's Date"? #fatfingers

Planting dates in the Normandy, at this rate of climate change, will be a matter of at least... decades.

Actually, effects of climate change are not that bad even when looked st the extreme 100yr scale.

This is the best explanation! Actually if the editor posted this article on her phone, it might even be auto-correct? What would that say about how often such an editor posts clickbait, that she uses the word "fate" more than the word "date"?

That was the RAF meteorologist, James Stagg, who persuaded Monty and Eisenhower to move the date from the 5th to the 6th. :)

Famously if they had not gone on the 6th the next tide window would have seen the worst storms in years.

The Met Office's page: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/in-depth/d-day-70th-annive...

There is an excellent write-up of this at https://medium.com/@garius/the-weatherman-the-man-who-decide...

Thank you for linking that. I'd not known that Krick was quite so alternative in his beliefs!

And the forecast was verified with a last-minute weather report from the lighthouse at Blacksod, Ireland, thanks to a 1921 agreement:

https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/how-blacksod-lighthouse-...

"An hour later, the same caller, 'a lady with an English accent', asked for the latest weather observations."

https://www.flickr.com/photos/openplaques/13198792295/

It should be "contributed one of many factors that decided when D-Day would occur". It's annoying that people always want to find a hero who did it all alone.

fwiw i actually posted it with the articles title and it was updated without my knowledge

The HN title is faithful to the actual HTML title tag, including the word "Fate". The headline on the page differs.

This sort of mismatch seems fairly common. It's probably some sort of SEO scheme...

I wonder to what extent they A/B test these titles, then pick the one getting the most traction.

They omitted the lede - the original plan for that day was disrupted by very severe sea and weather conditions; Eisenhower decided to risk the landing with a good chance of better weather by then, but would he have done so with less certainty about the tidal conditions as well? It was a close decision, so perhaps not, in which case there wouldn't have been a battle that day at all.

The timing of d-day was important to the outcome because it allowed the allies to benefit from some really good luck. The German's were caught off guard, and were slow to respond. This reaction was hardly assured and may have been different if D-day had gone ahead later. It is interesting how some quite modest efforts contributed to this. For example, superior weather forcasting allowed the allies to exploit a weather window that the German's did not know about. It is interesting to ponder how things may have been different with less accurate data. And it demonstrates how vitally important detailed planning was.

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