D Day the first wave

[Wolfman]

I was researching information about D-Day, specifically how many survived the initial assault. Apparently there are not any complete records. Many drowned while many were killed by artillery and small weapons. Found this interesting read. If you have a couple minutes, it gives a verbal description that adds to any visual we've seen such as Private Ryan. Seems that but for a few very brave men, that day could have been a total disaster.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... ch/303365/

[Wolfman]

FYI: at Iwo Jima, the Japanese held off their fire until the Marines had landed most of their men and gear. Then it became hell. Their entrenched position on Mt.Surabachi gave them a huge advantage. The Japs knew it was hopeless. They just wanted to kill as many as they could before they died.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

I've always wondered why the assault on Omaha Beach didn't include air support

"element of surprise", I imagine.

[Wolfman]

Through the use of deception, Hitler was convinced the assault would come near Calais, with Patton leading the way. It still took a lot of luck and blood and guts for the Allies to be victorious. I had a college prof who was in the 82nd Airborne glider assault group. That was mostly a fiasco too. He got captured and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp. As the last WW2 vets pass on, I hope that we learn as much as we can about what happened.

[mvscal]

I've always wondered why the assault on Omaha Beach didn't include air support

Seems as though bombing runs on those beach pill boxes would have saved a lot of soldiers

They did, you idiot. They pounded the fuck out of it with air and naval gunfire. The place still looks like a moonscape with all the craters. The bunkers still have little chunks blasted off from direct hits.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

[smackaholic]

I've always wondered why the assault on Omaha Beach didn't include air support

Seems as though bombing runs on those beach pill boxes would have saved a lot of soldiers

They did, you idiot. They pounded the fuck out of it with air and naval gunfire. The place still looks like a moonscape with all the craters. The bunkers still have little chunks blasted off from direct hits.

What ^^^^ said.

Air support was nice to have, but it was largely ineffective back then. We have been conditioned by 20+ years of smart bomb video to think that it has always effective. of course even today, in the end, it is the grunts that have to go in and do the dirty work. My father in law was a huge military history buff and being a retired army reserve officer, he took every opportunity to remind me how badly the airforce and navy fukked up at normandy and got an assload of soldiers dead.

[mvscal]

Pretty sure even back then Bombs could take out concrete bunkers

You would be wrong. Even modern airpower is of only limited use against dug in troops.

Those little dings you see are direct hits from naval gunfire.



This is what the ground looks like 60 years later. They didn't miss very much.

[Atomic Punk]

what about incendiaries?

On those targets? No. You might make the concrete and surrounding soil hot. However, I don't think he's stating that modern weaponry can't destroy those specific targets... I hope.

[matteric]

The Japs knew it was hopeless.

The only unfortunate thing in this thread... is that the Japanese engineers who designed your life saving device... didn't pull the plug on your ignorant ass.


There's not much in life that pisses me off... other than ignorant pricks.



If you die in a grease fire... God was awake that day.



What an ignorant prick !

[mvscal]

Wow. That's pretty embarrassing.

:doh: :doh: :doh:

[mvscal]

However, I don't think he's stating that modern weaponry can't destroy those specific targets... I hope.

Of course they can...theoretically. In actual practice, however, air power remains wildly unreliable against entrenched targets.

[Wolfman]

Don't know that much about the effectiveness of modern ordinance. They blasted the crap out of Iwo Jima before the landing assault and it seems to have been largely ineffective. The Japanese were quite skilled at building tunnels and bunkers. They had plenty of time to prepare. Sadly the whole operation was a real waste as the island did not play an important role in the rest of the war.

[Left Seater]

Wow. That's pretty embarrassing.

:doh: :doh: :doh:

How many people from the framers to the sign makers and any visitors have seen that mistake? How are you the caretaker of such a museum worth piece of history and not immediately fix that mistake?

[mvscal]

Sadly the whole operation was a real waste as the island did not play an important role in the rest of the war.

What the fuck are you talking about? Over two thousand B-29s made emergency landings at Iwo Jima each one with an eleven man crew.

[Wolfman]

What the fuck are you talking about? Over two thousand B-29s made emergency landings at Iwo Jima each one with an eleven man crew.

Read a little more and you'll see I am not alone in that assessment. Other islands could have done the same job according to several military historians. On the strategic side of things, MacArthur proposed simply skipping over many of those islands and leaving the Japanese to eventually surrender due to lack of supplies. That plan would certainly have saved a lot of US lives.

[mvscal]

What the fuck are you talking about? Over two thousand B-29s made emergency landings at Iwo Jima each one with an eleven man crew.

Read a little more and you'll see I am not alone in that assessment.

Try reading more than a little. In any event, that wasn't your point. You said the airfield was of little use not that we could have used other islands for the same purpose.

Now if you want to talk about completely unnecessary bloodbaths we can discuss Peleliu. 8,000 men were killed and maimed for absolutely no reason at all.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

I know incendiaries were available in WWII as they were used on Dresden

Wouldn't they have been effective in killing the Germans in the bunkers on Omaha beach?

What did you expect them to set fire to? The sand?

[Dinsdale]

Scott -- go find yourself a concrete building with no exterior wood, dump a bunch of gasoline on it, light it, and get back to us with the results.

And napalm doesn't have accelerants, it has retardants.

And the WW2 version of napalm was called "napalm."

[smackaholic]

jeeebus, scott, when marty has to explain military tactics to you, you officially suck.

you can drop incendiaries outside those pillboxes all day long, so long as you don't catch the defenders sunbathing, it will do nothing. and they were fukking huns, they don't tan.

the only incendiaries that worked were the flamethrowers used by the soldiers knocking at the door.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

Napalm removes Oxygen and generates carbon monoxide which results in death by Asphyxiation http://science.howstuffworks.com/napalm1.htm

Just stop.

[Wolfman]

White phosphorus (WP, Willy Peter) is nasty stuff. don't know why it was mostly if not only used in the bombing of cities in WW2. We had these WP devices, looked like a metal lap top with a grenade like starter that you could put on equipment in the event of getting over run. Once that stuff starts, you can't put it out. One could melt an engine block on a deuce and a half. Flamethrowers were used with pretty good effect in the Pacific battles we're discussing.
The one thing you cannot deny is the sheer courage of the US troops under fire. Lousy planning, poor leadership, and other impediments were overcome by the guys doing the fighting. We owe them at the least to make sure their heroics will not be forgotten by future generations.

[mvscal]

White phosphorus (WP, Willy Peter) is nasty stuff. don't know why it was mostly if not only used in the bombing of cities in WW2. We had these WP devices, looked like a metal lap top with a grenade like starter that you could put on equipment in the event of getting over run.

That was thermite not white phosphorus.

[mvscal]

Napalm removes Oxygen and generates carbon monoxide which results in death by Asphyxiation http://science.howstuffworks.com/napalm1.htm

So do conventional explosives with a number of other nasty side-effects. There weren't any thermobaric weapons in WW2 although (of course) the Germans were experimenting with them.

You are engaging in 'magical thinking' here, Scott. The medium and heavy bombers of the day were nowhere nearly accurate enough to deliver ordinance on a pinpoint target. Fighter-bombers were capable of the accuracy but they had neither the ordinance or the doctrine to carry out that mission. The air-ground communication necessary to carry out effective close air support is not a trivial task under any circumstance let alone in a "jesus fuck help us we're getting shithosed off the beach what do I do now" type situation.

The close fire support role on D-day was provided by US and Royal Navy destroyers who nearly beached themselves to piss on Nazi bunkers whenever they got the call. Yeah, they might look like little dingers on the outside but it was probably a well below average experience inside.

I have been to Omaha Beach and stood in German observation bunkers and wiederstandnests and asked myself the same stupid question that everybody asks, "How did anyone get off that beach alive?" The answer is all over the place. I showed it to you in two simple photos. The answer is that the men defending that beach were bleeding from their ears and heavily concussed. That they were capable of any sort of organized resistance at all is a minor miracle itself. That was the biggest failure of D-Day planning. Intelligence failed to identify the German 352nd Infantry Division in the Omaha sector. They were green but they were well trained, well equipped Germans with a veteran officer and NCO cadre not the demoralized Ukrainian conscripts which we expected.

The notion that the navy and air force let the army down is vacuous and utterly uninformed burbling which is easily refuted by the physical evidence.

[smackaholic]

would have been fun to watch mvscal and my father-in-law discuss D-day. He claimed that a lot of the Naval gunfire went long and tore up everything a few hundred yards inland and that the AAF pilots also missed their marks because they were pretty much chickenshits. I suspect this view was probably common among army infantry officers from his generation (50-60s) who were schooled by dudes that were there on the beach or knew someone who was. At his eulogy I talked about how chuck was of the opinion that the army would have faired better had they just swam across the channel rather than put their lives into the hands of the navy. that was a bit of an exaggeration, but, not much. i really miss that fukker.

[smackaholic]

What was dropped on Dresden?

plain old incendiaries. dresden, unlike the atlantic wall, was built largely of very burnable shit. ditto, tokyo. would have been nice had they built those bunkers out of kindling.

[Atomic Punk]

There weren't any thermobaric weapons in WW2 although (of course) the Germans were experimenting with them.

What was dropped on Dresden?

Fighter-bombers were capable of the accuracy but they had neither the ordinance or the doctrine to carry out that mission.

What does that mean? The fighters never strafed battlefields or were not built for that type of mission?

Scott, I think I now see why you are so hung up on the fire bombing and the lack of understanding of the weights of bunker busting ordnance (not "ordinance" Wolfman).

You assume that those pill boxes had German soldiers directly under the concrete structures to where the fire can starve them of oxygen, right? Even the primitive jihadists have tunnels from the ingress/egress points. mvs' point about taking out those targets with modern weaponry is that even though the visual target can be destroyed... you don't know exactly where they've tunneled underneath or their depths. That is true to this day.

Modern-day bunker busters are precision-guided and come in at angles to penetrate the surface and have delayed fuses. The problem is at which angle do you strike from? The munitions now are also very heavy averaging in the 2000lb class. Normally aspirating powered aircraft (prop jobs) back then can't go very far with that much weight on board and return to base.

[mvscal]

And the WW2 version of napalm was called "napalm."

According to MVS you're wrong

Napalm is basically jellied gasoline. It isn't a fuel air explosive.