The Unsolved Mystery of the D-Day Puzzles
history.co.uk
history.co.uk
A small nit: The assertion that secrecy, i.e. absence of information was the key espionage tactic at play here is not quite right. Instead, the allies put a massive amount of effort into misinformation.
Going from memory… In his book, The Longest Day, Cornelius Ryan reported that the Germans knew the location, the approximate dates, and had even determined what signal would be sent to the French Resistance (a particular stanza in a poem read in a radio broadcast.) Getting higher ups in the German apparatus to believe that they had figured it all out was the main failure.
The allies also had the benefit of experience in the Pacific. They knew that once you had a beachhead, victory was a matter of stuffing enough troops over the line and slogging through attrition. There were more American replacements than Germans.
As for the value of attrition, it seems to me it was the Germans who chose attritional warfare not the Allies. They fought a largely attritional battle, then ran like hell the moment it turned to maneuver.
The failure to take armour has been blamed as a cause of the huge casualties the US took. However the weather was terrible, so it might have exacerbated the problem.
The Americans had a pattern: bombardment, storm beaches, fight fight fight....
The New Zealand forces used this to their advantage. When they had to take an Island they would row ashore in the night with some howitzers, sneak up the beech. They knew where their enemy camped, relative to the beech, where they were waiting for teh naval bombardment to start, then stop, whence they planned to go down to the beech and machine gun the American troops coming ashore.
The New Zealand forces would already be ashore, dug in, and wake their enemy up with howitzers from the shore based dug in positions.
All his life he had a contempt for American culture based on that experience. "They depend so much on technology" he would say.
Yes. They (the Americans) had a lot of experience. But they were not the best.
Having fought across North Africa and then just fought thru Monte Casino my dad, also a kiwi, at least once noted that those d-day guys were "johnny come latelies" :-)
A lot of the German high command was convinced that the landings would be at the Pas de Calais (the shortest crossing). The Allies did a lot to support this view, including using Gen Patton as the commander of the fake army that would conduct this crossing. Even after the Normandy landings, the Germans were very reluctant to commit the forces that were ready for the 'fake' invasion (which of course never happened).
Wikipedia, and all the journalists recently covering the story, take all his assertions at face value and don't seem to question whether it's a simple spotlight-seeking tall tale.
It seems like he told his story after everyone who could corroborate or disprove it was already dead.
He did say he was wearing a uniform (albeit, I assume, a British one) and most of those soldiers were basically kids anyway, so maybe he really did just walk in there and nobody noticed. Does sound pretty wild, though.
I grew up in a small village just a few kilometers from the Iron Curtain. At one of the heights of the cold war, during the big NATO manoeuvres in the early 80s we had often American camps next to the village. After school or during weekends we kids went to the camp every day. I remember that we secretly brought beer (as a present) to the GIs so that their officers didn't notice and that I played chess with them in their tents.
So the part of the story about kids wandering around military camps sounds pretty convincing to me.
So, now you kids today know another reason why we old timers are like we are.
I didn't do exactly this, but I will admit now, 25 years later that I collected unused cartridges after military exercises and brought loads of them in my bag at the plane :-)
Edit: missed the roman goddess not alaska town bit my fault
I recall seeing "Charlie Chaplin's wife" ("Oona") almost once a month. Get yourself painted into a corner? Oona.
I'd say it was selection bias.
Being able to communicate to your entire intelligence apparatus "hey send me everything you see about OMAHA or SWORD" might get you hundreds of small pieces of intel that would be too trivial to forward to command alone - but taken together could have laid out the entire battle plan.
I'm honestly curious and don't know, would love to read more on that topic if anyone has more info.
However, of course, the truism that there are no winners in war remains. No military operation is going to have a low cost of human life, even a successful one.
Whilst without D-Day the allies would still have likely won but it quite likely would’ve involved nuking Berlin and far more massive air raids an German occupied Europe.
However, for an amphibious assault, especially one against a prepared and well-fortified enemy, "not being pushed back into the sea" is by far the most important operational objective to succeed, and D-Day succeeded very much at that.
I doubt it could have stopped the invasion, but would have made it much more costly.
The V2 rockets I believe did more damage to the cities in German hands than to Allied positions (including the bridge itself, which was unharmed by the attack).
Caen (port area up to 9 miles from the beach) was a D-Day objective, but depending on the area took 1 month to 3 months to capture. The Allies were slow, and the Germans knew it was a strategic location. Regardless, it just meant that the German army was destroyed around Caen, instead of elsewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_for_Caen
Of the 5 landing sites, Omaha Beach was the bloodiest, with Americans wading ashore into machine gun fire, killing around 2,000 Americans.
(In Italy and Holland, Americans were also mowed down as the Germans retreated.)
The most famous disastrous amphibian landings were Galipoli in WW1, where the British failed to break out of their beach heads, and also lost numerous ships to mines and shore batteries. This tarnished Winston Churchill's reputation for decades. The victory by Turkey led to its rise as a modern state.
And the US struggled with 3 landings (Anzio, etc.) in Italy in WW2 due to General Clark and his staff trying to consolidate beach heads before breaking out, allowing Germans to occupy high ground, after the landings!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Anzio#Breakout
Literally, the Americans would loiter on the sand instead of sending a dozen troops to secure roads and hills before the Germans arrived with artillery.
The US had phenomenal leaders in the Pacific War, but Italy was a total failure in multiple dimensions. Historians today just laugh at our role in Italy - it was that bad.
(The British had the weird problem that upon reaching the beach, soldiers would sit down and start making tea, even under fire.)
More importantly than that, it meant that Nazi Germany's eventual defeat, which was probably inevitable at that point anyway, did not come solely at the hands of the Red Army. I imagine the scenario that really kept Roosevelt and Churchill up at night was one where the Soviets defeated Germany and then kept going until they reached the Atlantic, with France and the Low Countries falling under Soviet domination the way that the countries of Eastern Europe ultimately did. The success of the D-Day landings meant that the iron curtain ran down the middle of Europe and not down its Western shore.