Nazi Battery Unearthed

[Wise1]

Just watched the episode, quite interesting, Not my particular area of interest however I never knew the allied bombing campaign went so wrong when it was supposed to deal such a blow to the Germans

[Adrian Roberts]

I've just watched the Timewatch programme, using Virginmedia's Catch-up On Demand facility for the first time.

A brief reaction: it seems that the planners knew that Omaha would incur heavy casualties because of its physical features - dominated by "bluffs" (cliffs) with pillboxes on top, including those at either end of the beach which enabled enfilading fire. So why was it so necessary to take out Omaha on the first day? If they wanted to land on five beaches, was there no alternative? Could not they have landed on the other four and surrounded Omaha from the rear later? The landing forces needed to advance inland, but it would only have taken a relatively small proportion of them to isolate the Omaha garrison from reinforcements, and either attack from the rear or just starve them into surrender.

And the lessons of WW1 had not been learned. The experience of July 1st 1916 should have taught them not to rely on heavy bombardments to take out a dug-in enemy - especially a sufficient time in advance to alert the occupants of an attack. And by 1918, both the almost successful German Kaiserschlact of March/April 1918 and the ultimately successful British advance from Amiens in the "last hundred days" of the war relied on bypassing strongpoints and surrounding them later, rather than frontal assaults: as I said above, why couldn't this have been done with Omaha?

But of course, the Americans are not good at learning from previous mistakes, as at Belleau Wood in 1918, let alone certain much more recent examples.

[Wise1]

I suppose it comes back to my comment regarding the bombing campaign, had it done its job Omaha would not have been as bloody, but in effect the entire bombing left everything intact, by which time it was too late to turn them back or change the plan.

The very fact they managed to take it was an incredible feat given the circumstances.

[Kitty]

A good book on the bombing campaign for D Day is D-Day Bombers. Seems a hell of a lot went wrong.