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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

> The First U.S. Army, accounting for the first twenty-four hours in Normandy, tabulated 1,465 killed, 1,928 missing, and 6,603 wounded. The after-action report of U.S. VII Corps (ending 1 July) showed 22,119 casualties including 2,811 killed, 5,665 missing, 79 prisoners, and 13,564 wounded, including paratroopers.

https://www.historyonthenet.com/d-day-casualties

So it was actually pretty close: ~800 US troops killed during the rehearsal vs 1465 during the actual landing.

Somehow, from "Saving Private Ryan", I had imagined that the death tole was much greater.

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If this interests you, look at the number of casualties in the days after d-day. D-day itself gets commemorated not because it was the highest amount of casualties but because it signified both the resolve of the allied world and the strength of our non-commissioned and junior officers to take charge and lead despite complete chaos. D-day was a massive undertaking so large and risky that just training for it risked enormous casualties (as outlined by the article - the incident mentioned isn’t a secret it has been well documented for a long time). Therefore it was with tremendous risk to execute and the fact that the casualty count wasn’t catastrophic is a testimony to the men on the beach. Another great series is band of brothers which shows how these men self organized and led each other despite not having a predefined blueprint for every scenario. Something we could all learn from - how many of our teams run this way versus needing constant commanding from ‘generals’ and blueprints for every scenario?

You probably need to include most of the missing as part of the death toll. I think KIA are confirmed deaths and a lot of soldiers drowned and had their bodies carried off by the currents, never to be found.

That, and "including paratroopers" suggests a lot of people hit in the air, dropped over water, or killed after landing who might never have been recovered. Wikipedia suggests that the airborne missions in Normandy alone involved 1,000 dead and 4,500 missing, so listing a total death toll of 1,000 would have to be beaches-only.

Wikipedia's number is 4,414 deaths:

> Research under way by the National D-Day Memorial has confirmed 4,414 deaths, of which 2,499 were American and 1,915 were from other nations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandy_landings#cite_note-Al...

Yes, and the comparison here is just US deaths.

Most of the deaths were on Omaha beach, where US Bombers completely missed their targets. US Bombers hit the farmlands miles inland, instead of the bunkers. In effect: the Bombers of Omaha Beach forgot about momentum and dropped the bombs "over" Omaha Beach (instead of "over the sea", where momentum would carry the bombs to Omaha Beach). IIRC, there were also Paratroopers who were dropped around the bombings, to slow down any reinforcements.

The soldiers on Omaha beach were expecting:

1. Surprise Attack

2. Bomber support

3. Paratroopers preventing reinforcements

#1 and #3 were negated because the Nazis just happened to be holding practice drills at the time and were on the beach anyway. #2 was negated because the bombers missed.

Sometimes, it comes down to luck.

You forgot about

4. Support from ambhibious tanks

negated by almost all the tanks at Omaha sinking before reaching shore due to bad wave conditions.

Do you happen to know why the Omaha bombers missed as a group? The failure to 'lead' the target makes sense, I'm wondering why it wasn't individual to planes but systematic for the beach.

My guess would be that the time to drop was called wrong by a flight commander or computed wrong beforehand, rather than assessed individually in each plane, but if you happen to know more I'd be curious.

Good question.

I looked it up, and it seems like the operation was way more complex than I thought (and it already sounded quite complex to me!)

1. The skys were overcast, so the bombers were dropping blind through the clouds.

2. The Omaha-beach bombers erred on the side of caution: they didn't want to release the bombs too early, because that would be "Friendly Fire", hitting the Allied Troops instead.

Its quite possible that the bomber squadron simply all missed because the clouds were just over Omaha beach (but not necessarily over the other beaches).

I'm mostly reading this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omaha_Beach#Pre-landing_bombar...

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It sounds like there's widespread agreement that the Naval commanders didn't offer enough battleship bombardment support as well.

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So the full set of events are:

1. Bombers missed (clouds blocked their view + worried about friendly fire)

2. Navy commanders made a strategic error, and failed to deploy enough battleship support.

3. Commando Paratroopers failed to stop reinforcements, because reinforcements were already at the Beach holding a training drill.

4. 27 of the 29 amphibious tanks sank due to heavy waves. The landing infantry had to run up-hill in the beach sand into machine guns without any tank-support.

5. Bad waves meant a lot of infantry landed off-target of their initial plan. The amphibious vessels hit a sandbar, meaning many infantry started their journey not on the sands of the beach, but wading in the water 50-feet into the water still.

Pretty much every bad-luck event possible happened on Omaha beach.

Of the six beaches (2 US, 3 UK and 1 Canadian) Omaha was, I believe, by far the most heaving defended.

Only the one Beach actually had very strong defences the other 5 beaches did not have many initial casualties.

IIRC the main difference was that the Allies failed to take out (with bombings and artillery fire) defenses on Omaha beach as they did on the other beaches.

I've read somewhere that some Allied pilots feared hitting the beaches and so released their bombs late; I don't know how true this is though.

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