Was D-day really deemed a success? Yes we succeeded in establishing a beachhead but wasn't the human cost much higher than anticipated?
I'm honestly curious and don't know, would love to read more on that topic if anyone has more info.
I'm honestly curious and don't know, would love to read more on that topic if anyone has more info.
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.)
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, 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.
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.