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I hope you're ready for another thread discussing things that are less widely known that the iconic Robert Capa pictures of Omaha Beach #DDay75thAnniversary
As I wrote yesterday, capturing the beaches was the easy part. You may have though then that this was just a way to capture your attention. It wasn't. Compared to the weeks following the landings, the beaches were the easy part. /
"Oh", you may say "but we have all seen 'Saving private Ryan', and we all know that it was one big bloodbath." Well, exactly that it wasn't. Let's discuss facts and figures. By midnight, 130.000 men had landed on the beaches, and close to 23.000 man had been airborne. /
Total casualties at the end of the day were around 10.000, of which 2.500 dead (1.000 on Omaha Beach). While one could argue that these are still high losses for one day of fighting, one should keep in mind that this was a frontal assault against an enemy who had had 4 /
years to dig in. By man who had to wade with heavy equipment through water after having spent a night in a ship during storm weather. In order to have a point of comparison: during the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, the British lost /
60.000 men (including 20.000 dead). Or compare with Waterloo: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of… /
So, all in all, casualties were rather limited. And lower than the Allied planners had expected. What were the reasons for this? One key reason is that the Allies had put in practice what the Germans had intended to do: they had put the machines at the heart of warfare /
For instance, a key innovation were Hobart's funnies, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobart%27…, tanks that had been designed by the British army to take over tasks that in other armies were fulfilled by men
For instance, the AVRE Bobbin unrolled a canvas onto the ground to form a "path", so that following vehicles would not sink into the soft ground of the beaches - thanks to this, the infantry got tank support right from the start / 
Or this modified Churchill tank without a turret that had extendable ramps at each end over which other vehicles could drive up ramps and over the vehicle to scale obstacles.
OK, you can have a look at the Wilkipedia page for more examples (credits to that page for the pictures). Just to have an idea of the importance of these vehicles, think of the German army, where the casualties among combat engineers were higher than among infantry men /
And, on D-Day, the only beach with really high casualties was Omaha Beach - which didn't use any of the "funnies". Another important factor was that the lessons of the less-than-spectacularly-successful landings on the Mediterranean theater had been well integrated /
(As I already pointed out yesterday, a key organisational innovation of that period was the joint and integrated staff). /
A beautiful illustration of this improved coordination is one of the key factors that saved the day at Omaha Beach (and is not shown in the movies): how the navy provided direct fire support to the infantry, and how the fires were coordinated by officers who were on the beach /
Due to a lack of portable radios, this type of coordination was impossible during the first world war, and this was a major cause of casualties for attacking troops. Stop the artillery preparation too early, and the enemy has the time to recover (like the Germans at the Somme) /
Stop too late, and you kill your own infantry (as often happened to the French). But probably the most important factor (and which is obviously overlooked in romantic accounts of the war) was simply that the German resistance on D-Day was not really impressive. In 1944, /
the German army had already suffered extremely heavy losses on the Eastern front. To fill its manpower shortage, it had recruited "volunteers" for minorities in the Soviet Union, and a significant share of the troops in Normandy (where an invasion was considered unlikely) /
were actually not German at all. And not very keen on dying for the Fuhrer. Incidentally, the only high-quality troops were the ones that faced the Americans at Omaha Beach. Add to this some ridiculous aspects of the German chain of command: the Panzer divisions could only be /
moved following orders of Hitler himself, which was not really a wise procedure, given that the Fuhrer slept through his mornings. The Germans thus lost precious hours when the beachheads were at their most vulnerable /
So, no, except for the first 6 hours at Omaha Beach, D-Day went surprisingly well for the Allies. It was after that that the troubles began. Why? Well, you need to understand that, while the Allies had an obvious material advantage compared to the Germans, this didn't matter in /
the first days after the invasion. What mattered then was that the Allies had established a bridgehead, and that the battle for the bridgehead was a race against time. A race where no party had an obvious advantage /
The Germans had the obvious advantage that they could bring troops by land. However, they couldn't move during the day (lest they be spotted by the Allied Air Forces) and the French transport infrastructure had been severely damaged in the bombing campaign that preceded D-Day /
On the other hand, the Allied had almost complete control of the skies - but they had to bring in their troops over sea. And they faced one hell of a bottleneck: the harbors. I had already pointed out yesterday that the British had figured out that the minimal port capacity that/
would be needed to supply the troops and bring in reinforcements was the harbor of Cherbourg. Small problem: the disastrous raid on Dieppe in 1942 had shown that frontal attacks of harbors were not an option, and Cherbourg would thus have to be taken from behind. In order to /
bridge the time between the landings and the capture of Cherbourg, the British imagined another major technological innovation of the war: the Murlberries, artificial harbours, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulberry_… that had been built in Britain/
transported over the Channel, and the installed on the landing beaches. (Some of the technology used in building those marvels is still in use in marinas). Just a little problem: in the week after the landing, a major storm blew over the Channel and largely destroyed the /
Murlberries. While this was a major blow to Allied supplies, German reinforcements arrived in force. And, on the ground, the Allied troops found out that things were not really going smoothly. One reason is that these reinforcements were of clearly higher quality than the troops/
they had faced on D-Day itself. Moreover, they soon found out in the so-called Battle of the Hedgerows that the Normandic landscape of the Bocage (see picture below) didn't lend itself very well to large scale mechanical warfare/
In a landscape where the Allies could not fully deploys their material might, what mattered was close range fighting between infantry, and the Allies had not obvious advantage there. So, the second and the third week after D-Day were really the most frightening /
for those who had a helicopter view of the situation. It has been admitted that a well coordinated German attack between Bayeux and Caen could have put the beachhead in serious jeopardy. But, as Hitler was convinced that the landing in Normandy was just a diversion for a /
major attack close to Boulogne-sur-Mer, he didn't move troops from the Pas-de-Calais region to Normandy. And by the beginning of July, it was already too late. After 6 weeks of (almost) stalemate, the Americans broke through the German positions at Saint Lo, /
and the newly arrived Third Army of General Patton could start its race through Brittany
