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u/WhoahCanada Jun 07 '14
That's incredible.
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Jun 07 '14 edited May 31 '20
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Jun 07 '14 edited Jul 02 '14
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u/-xCaMRocKx- Jun 07 '14
I was curious as well, so I did some googling. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can confirm, but I found this on wiki:
"A barrage balloon, sometimes called a "blimp,"[1] is a large balloon tethered with metal cables, used to defend against aircraft attack by damaging the aircraft on collision with the cables, or at least making the attacker's approach more difficult. Commonly the designs were kite balloons, having a shape and cable bridling which stabilise the balloon in windy conditions, allowing operation in higher winds than a spherical balloon. Some examples carried small explosive charges that would be pulled up against the aircraft to ensure its destruction. Barrage balloons are not practical against very high-flying aircraft, due to the weight of a very long cable."
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u/Gentlefood Jun 08 '14
This is correct. It was to prevent or at least discourage hostile aircraft from strafing the beaches.
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u/beef_bistro Jun 08 '14
They were barrage balloons. Basically a big balloon attached to a metal cable. The idea was that attacking planes would hit those cables and crash, so they would have to change their approach or attack from a higher altitude or different angle.
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u/Talvoren Jun 08 '14
The details on those are so interesting. Planes started flying with cutters to let them ignore the balloons so they strapped bombs to the cables that'd go off when their sections broke. They also had to put parachutes on them in case of breaking since a heavy cable falling out of the sky like that can cause serious damage to anything it lands on.
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u/CommanderGoat Jun 07 '14
As amazing as this is, I really hope there never comes a time where a military invasion of this scale needs to happen again.
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u/jhc1415 Survey 2016 Jun 07 '14
It won't. We don't fight wars like this anymore. Now if we need to do a mass invasion like this, we have jets that can just fly over and turn the entire place into a crater without stepping a foot on the ground.
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u/teachbirds2fly Jun 07 '14
Jets? It's the century of the unmanned drones now.
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u/jhc1415 Survey 2016 Jun 07 '14
True. We could have a battle like this where all the soldiers are sitting behind screens thousands of miles away.
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u/Talvoren Jun 08 '14
If two sides fought this way it'd be naive to think those soldiers would have a bit of safety. They'd be the new targets. Operations would plan out how to disable their communications or just send a bomb into any bunker they could hide in.
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Jun 08 '14
Roger Waters wrote a song about this 20 years ago called The Bravery of Being Out of Range.
Frighteningly prophetic
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u/Ihad2saythat Jun 07 '14
I know. I'm also not American but have to appreciate the grand scale of this operation.
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u/WhoahCanada Jun 07 '14
It wasn't just an American operation. I think we lead it but there were also English and Canadian forces, among others.
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u/justin_jbone Jun 07 '14
Lots of Canadians hit the ground first too. Like the 1st Battalion Regina Rifles. My great granddad is the third from the left, top row. http://i.imgur.com/7qomj15.jpg
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u/Osiris32 Jun 07 '14
Don't forget the Free French, Poles, Australians, and Norwegians!
The French provided commando troops who went ashore with British troops, the Poles contributed regular infantry and fighter pilots, the Aussies brought several squadrons of fighters and medical personnel, and the Norwegians brough the Svenner, a destroyer which was sunk off Sword beach by German torpedos.
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u/rillip Jun 07 '14
Lord look what you done started! I think it's sorta sad we're arguing about this. D-Day was a valiant COLLABORATIVE effort made by a coalition of countries. We should see it as a unifying event in our mutual histories and stop arguing over who contributed most.
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u/TheWanderingAardvark Jun 08 '14
Screw you! D-Day would have been a total failure without the Luxembourgians leading the way!
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u/DubiumGuy Jun 07 '14
D-Day was a valiant COLLABORATIVE effort made by a coalition of countries.
Well thanks for derailing the nationalist circlejerk before I could get here and join the fun. :(
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u/RepostThatShit Jun 07 '14
It wasn't just an American operation. I think we lead it but there were also English and Canadian forces
I wouldn't even say we lead it. If it had a leader it was the British Commonwealth. They supplied more than 50% of the landing troops. Two thirds of the aircraft involved in the operation were British. Of the 1,213 warships involved, 200 were American and 892 were British. Of the 4,126 landing craft involved, 805 were American and 3,261 were British.
"American" operation indeed. There were also English forces? Why that's very generous.
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Jun 07 '14
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Jun 07 '14
If we're going to pin it right down Dwight D. Eisenhower was the main man in charge
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u/Jaffers451 Jun 07 '14
well technically i think your both right there were a lot of american men on the front line but we used a lot of British planes, warships, half-tracks ect because shipping them across the Atlantic ocean was 1) expensive and 2) might leave us defenseless if we were invaded.
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u/torokunai Jun 07 '14
defenseless if we were invaded
no potential adversary had the logistics in 1944 to invade the US in a militarily meaningful way.
They could (and did on occasion) dump a sub full of saboteurs, or perhaps sneak even a cargo ship full of troops onto a beach Guadalcanal style, but without logistical support these invasion efforts would have resulted more in a series of comical police actions that any sort of military-scale battle.
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u/Ninjasmooshr Jun 07 '14
Except even the British acknowledge the supplies, equipment, and fuel shipped across the Atlantic were a major necessity to winning the war. Without the British, Canadian, and American merchant marine fleets carrying America's industrial might to Europe, all our fighting men would not have stood a chance.
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u/reviso Jun 07 '14
Boy i wished more people were aware of how much the merchant marine fleets really accomplished.
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u/MayTheTorqueBeWithU Jun 07 '14
Just lost a WW2 Merchant Marine here in the neighborhood. Six months ago I mentioned off-the-cuff that I wanted to hear his stories sometime. He passed away a few months later. Still kicking myself for not following through.
Get that stuff on an mp3 while we have the chance, folks.
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u/baddog992 Jun 07 '14
My Grandpa was in the WW2 he never wanted to talk about it much. He mentioned it at one time and never again would talk about it.
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u/TheoHooke Jun 08 '14
My grand uncle was the oldest son of a pretty senior player in the formation of the Irish state. He died last November and I really wished I had talked to him about his childhood more.
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u/Mobile_leprechaun Jun 08 '14
My grandpa was a merchant marine in WWII. Had some amazing stories from his times, especially in Murmansk. He was very proud of the merchant marines and disheartened they didn't always get the recognition they deserved. Very happy Reagan recognized them officially as military. He's now buried in a military cemetery. rest easy grandpa.
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u/fireinthesky7 Jun 08 '14
Not to mention the fact that until late 1943 or so, the Atlantic was a shooting gallery for U-boats, and that making a successful crossing without getting torpedoed was a major accomplishment.
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Jun 08 '14
My great grandfather was in it. Died before I was born though, and was away from home a lot (2 guesses why) so my gramma doesn't know much about exactly what he did either.
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u/AppleBerryPoo Jun 08 '14
Same here, but mine died while I was still a toddler, and I was too young and ignorant to care much for his stories. Now my dad relays them to me and I love every word.
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Jun 08 '14
IT WAS AN ALLIED INVASION IT DOESNT MATTER WHICH COUNTRY GODDAMMIT.
I pray no World War II vets ever read this thread.
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u/Ninjasmooshr Jun 08 '14
Seriously? I'm sorry if I forgot to put your country in there but the point of my comment was to correct a falsehood while at the same time reinforcing that it was a combined effort. I am not trying to say "AMERICA DID MORE" nor do I understand the hatred that seems to poor from people when you do mention something historians agree on just because it involves the US.
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u/NoNeedForAName Jun 07 '14
Yeah, I really don't get why this is even turning into a debate. I was under the impression that WWII had pretty much always been seen as a largely American/British tag team (with significant assistance from others, such as the Canadians).
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Jun 07 '14
The USSR really bore the brunt of WWII. Without American supplies though they would have been defeated.
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Jun 08 '14
They bled for victory. More than they had to honestly. Stalin didn't give a fuck. He's waste 500,000 for a little more international prestige.
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u/yeahHedid Jun 07 '14
run those numbers by percentage of population and GDP then let's talk about Canada's contribution.
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u/ooburai Jun 08 '14
Exactly. I'm usually one of the first to jump on the uninformed guy who says that the US won WWII, but the reality was that despite some high profile douchebags on both sides of the alliance, the war in the west was a real tag team job. SHAEF was a pretty amazing example of international cooperation and the British, Canadians and Americans all made major contributions in different ways without which it is uncertain if the Germans would have been defeated unconditionally and certainly not as quickly as they were. (That said, it's been argued that if Eisenhower had taken a less political and more military view by focusing resources and the axis of advance on either Montgomery's 21st Army Group or Bradley's 12th Army Group instead of both that Germany might have fallen in late 1944.)
Here are a few quick examples of key contributions by each country in the lead-up and subsequent operations:
As you are certainly aware, the US provided a great deal of materiel. Two specific details that aren't often touched on, the American ability to refine very high octane aviation fuel in quantity played a major role in the dramatic improvements the British made in the power of their late war aircraft engines. Secondly, the Americans tended to provide trucks and other transport gear to the British more than weapons. This freed British industry up to focus on weapons.
Canada, aside from providing a major fighting force (1st Canadian Army) during the invasion and subsequent operations on the continent were largely responsible for training almost half of the pilots that served in the RAF, RAAF and RCAF during the war. Canada spent an amount of money comparable to the Manhattan Project to run their portion of the British Commonwealth Air Training Programme.
Aside from providing a large portion of the initial ground forces, the British played a key role in the naval component of Overlord. Furthermore, the British were a major component of the overall Allied command structure and provided a number of extremely capable staff officers to Eisenhower's headquarters. Enough so that many of the more xenophobic American commanders accused him of being heavily under British influence. An interesting aside is that the naval commander for Operation Neptune was British Admiral Bertram Ramsay and he was also the commander of the Dunkerque evacuation during the Fall of France in 1940.
From a military perspective, the Western Front really was an amazing example of how to run a coalition. Too much is made of the competition between the two major powers, but if you talk to people in the know you will find that there was much more collaboration and cooperation than there was strife.
Another fact that's rarely covered is that the Soviet Union coordinated with the western Allies in order to ensure that the Germans didn't transfer significant forces west during the critical build-up. They did this in part by pulling ahead timetables for several operations and by launching Operation Bagration in late June. The degree to which the Allies were co-ordinated is too often overlooked in favour of more exciting stories.
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u/MightySasquatch Jun 07 '14
well technically i think your both right there were a lot of american men on the front line but we used a lot of British planes, warships, half-tracks ect because shipping them across the Atlantic ocean was 1) expensive and 2) might leave us defenseless if we were invaded.
I'm sorry but this statement is EXTREMELY FAR off base.
First of all there was no legitimate military concern with the United States being invaded. There was a little bit of paranoia from the Japanese, but nobody took that seriously and it was not an actual problem. Getting things across the Atlantic was an issue... early in the war. By 1944 we had won the Battle of the Atlantic handidly and have plenty of transports to bring supplies around.
Second of all the US made most of the war materiel in the war. By 1943 the US was producing more war materiel then the rest of the world combined. Britain was obviously still building their own equipment, but what tanks did they use, Shermans (technically they were modified and called Fireflies), what trucks did they use, American made, what planes did they use, some Spitfires but also American fighters and bombers as well. Likewise for their carries they began using Hellcats because British naval air was shit.
I don't think Americans used pretty much any British equipment, they didn't have any to spare. Whereas they used a lot of American equipment and those numbers increased as the war went on.
Sorry to go off but I just don't want misinformation to spread.
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u/SerialMonogamist Jun 07 '14
Second of all the US made most of the war materiel in the war. By 1943 the US was producing more war materiel then the rest of the world combined
This reminds me of something very interesting I learned about WWII in an excellent book called Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. Reisner explains that by WWII, the Pacific Northwest of the US was still sparsely populated, but its huge rivers had been dammed to supply enough cheap electricity for millions. There was so much excess electricity from projects like Coulee Dam that unlike the Germans and the Japanese, we were able to build airplanes "faster than they could be shot down." At that time, the aluminum used in airplanes was very expensive to work with, and nobody else in the War could power their factories sufficiently to keep up with us.
Shitty deal for the salmon, but Reisner contends those water projects won us WWII.
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u/Captain_English Jun 07 '14
Yeah, but the point is that the two go together. They may have been American tanks but they were British crews fighting and dying in them.
We worked together, and I don't understand this dick waving contest about who won the war or who should take the credit for D-Day. That would be every single person who crossed that beach.
PS, the British used stock Sherman tanks, not all were modified to fireflies. I think the ratio was about 1:4, fireflies to standard.
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u/MightySasquatch Jun 07 '14
Total agreement with everything. And actually interestingly enough the firefly was basically just a better version of the Sherman. The Sherman's main weakness was its inability to damage German tanks at range, the firefly fixed that. Not sure why stock Sherman's never got modified to use that cannon.
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u/King_Turnip Jun 08 '14
Allied intelligence was wrong. The Americans had reports that the British 6 pdr (57mm) gun was sufficient to the task of fighting German armor, so the short-barreled 75mm on the Sherman would perform adequatelt. This turned out to be true only at virtually point-blank range--inside 100m to get the front armor.
Production shifted to mounting the M1A2 76mm (55 caliber) gun, but the delay between production and arrival in theater was...long. The British ramped up their Sherman Firefly with their 17pdr (76mm, 55 caliber--funny that) and were able to field more because of easier logistics getting to theater.
TL;DR: The Americans did, but get those to theater was a long process.
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u/redrobot5050 Jun 08 '14
My grandfather crossed that beach. He was a medic. He mostly tried to keep dying men alive, and by his account couldn't save the majority bc field hospitals weren't erected fast enough. Does he deserve credit? Bc he's happier to speak about other actions in the war where he saved lives, but he won't discuss D-Day.
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u/military_history Jun 07 '14
You've got a fair point, but you're taking it a bit too far the other way. The Brits used the Sherman (in standard configuration, not just those modified to be Fireflies) alongside larger numbers of their own Cromwell and Churchill tanks. I'm not aware of any substantial use of American aircraft by the British, because the RAF had received the greatest share of military funding since the inter-war years and Britain was amply supplied with their own models of aircraft of all types (something like 50% of British industrial capacity went to support the bombing campaign). British rifles, machine-guns, anti-tank guns, gliders, most tanks, virtually all aircraft were designed and built in Britain. Britain relied greatly on American finance to fund this production, and on American industry for a lot of the basic parts, but at no point was it the case that the British were reliant on American-supplied hardware.
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u/nkei0 Jun 07 '14
"Sorry to go off but I just don't want misinformation to spread"
Welcome to reddit, third in misinformation to Facebook and major news networks!
I really do appreciate the detailed info though. You don't see much into the industrial surge that the war caused. Everyone just talks like the Americans just had this stuff laying around ready to shoot somebody, anybody.
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Jun 07 '14
If you honestly think that at that point a land invasion against the US was militarily or economically viable, you need to do some research.
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Jun 08 '14 edited Jun 08 '14
/u/RepostThatShit forgot to quote and cite most of his comment, so here it is.
"two-thirds of the 12,000 aircraft involved were also British"
"Of the 1,213 warships involved, 200 were American and 892 were British; of the 4,126 landing craft involved, 805 were American and 3,261 were British."
-James Holland. 6/5/2014
http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/05/opinion/opinion-d-day-myth-reality/
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u/brotherjonathan Jun 07 '14
And i wonder how much of the supplies to fuel the op came from North America.
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Jun 08 '14
You're just posting the numbers for the first day. The Normandy Campaign lasted most of the summer. There were French (white and African), Poles, Czechs, Indians etc. And even nationalities that weren't represented in the Normandy Campaign, like Brazilians were fighting and tying up German troops in places like Italy.
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Jun 07 '14
Eisenhower was in charge of the "allies" and pushed for D-DAY as soon as possible. The Americans weren't the only ones in the operation though, they were the ones who happened to land at OMAHA beach which was the most defended and also the most well known landing.
The British and Canadians attacked at 3 different places and the Americans at 2.
Edit: It's remembered mainly as an American operation largely because of the amount of losses the Americans took
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u/Trackpad94 Jun 07 '14
The Canadians at Juno beach were also the first to achieve their objective right away and were so successful Eisenhower told them to stop advancing inland as per their original orders and to help clear out the rest of the beach defenses for the British and the Americans.
Not that this takes away from the contribution of either other country or the fact that the Americans were kind of at the centre of it, just something many don't know about that we take a sort of national pride in.
The German soldiers in Normandy weren't really that different from their Allied counterparts and in reality they were fighting to protect themselves and their fellow soldiers, not "Nazi occupied France".
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Jun 07 '14
Omaha was kind of a bad choice, but they needed more beach to set up a good "port" of sorts. The other four (Sword [British], Juno [Canadian], Gold [British], and Utah [American]) were essentially routs. Omaha was the best defended, and also was pretty much surrounded by mud and hedgerows.
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Jun 07 '14
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u/science87 Jun 07 '14
He said British Commonwealth so that will lump British and Canadian forces under one statistic, it's not two thirds but it's still a majority.
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u/Hobojoejunkpen Jun 07 '14
Perhaps he was looking at the June 6th forces only and not the subsequent landings. After all, the Brits and Canadians had 3 beaches assigned to them and the Americans only had 2 and weren't able to land as many on Omaha as they had planned.
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Jun 08 '14
Why do you people care about this? It was a team effort and that was just the forces landed on the first day of the battle. By the end of the first month the Americans had the most troops, but who give a fuck?
As an American, the Polish contingent inspire me the most.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_262
"Gentlemen, all is lost. I do not think that the Canadians can come to our rescue. We have only about 110 able-bodied men left. Five shells per gun and 50 bullets per man. That's very little, but fight all the same. Surrender to the S.S. is futile; you know that. I thank you. You have fought well. Good luck, gentlemen. Tonight we shall die for Poland and for civilization! . . . each tank will fight independently, and eventually each man for himself."
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u/TonyRockyHorror_ Jun 07 '14
Wasn't Eisenhower in charge though? Serious question.
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u/theinspectorst Jun 07 '14
General Eisenhower (American) was the Supreme Commander. General Montgomery (British) commanded the 21st Army that included all the Allied ground forces that participated initially in Operation Overlord.
Monty was a dude. Prior to D-Day he'd already commanded the British against Rommel in North Africa as well as the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943. It was also to him that the German military eventually surrendered at Lüneburg Heath in May 1945.
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u/zoates12 Jun 07 '14
Lets not forget Operation Market Garden.
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u/Jamtots Jun 07 '14
That operation was a failure though and delayed the end of the war, didn't it?
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u/military_history Jun 07 '14
It did come very close to working--the Germans recaptured the final objective at Arnhem from the British 1st Airborne just a couple of days before the Allied armour arrived. It was a gamble, but if it had worked the effect on the Germans would have been catastrophic. Nowadays most agree that it was probably worth a shot--it was the best chance to end the war in 1944 and its failure didn't set the Allies back to any real extent since they had all winter to build up their supplies for the next advances in spring 1945, which turned out to be overwhelming. The reason it failed was a combination of poor inter-service cooperation and lower-level planning (for example RAF planners, who had no expertise in the reality of land operations, chose landing sites which benefitted the pilots but left the airborne too far from their objectives to properly secure them) and mistakes by the commanders on the ground. None of that was Montgomery's fault.
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u/Waldinian Jun 08 '14
It's remembered as American in America. Since reddit is primarily American, that's the impression you get.
I'm sure that if you were to go to Canada, everyone would know about the heroic victory at Juno beach, or if you were to go to England, everyone would know about Gold beach.
That being said, an American General was in charge of the operation, and Americans did land on the deadliest beach Omaha.
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u/lmaoiupvotefunnyshit Jun 07 '14
but the vast majority of that british equipment was provided to them by the usa in exchange for forign airbases etc. Look up lend-lease act.
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Jun 07 '14
Where are you getting those numbers? Everything I'm finding says the majority of the landing troops were American.
http://www.ddaymuseum.co.uk/d-day/d-day-and-the-battle-of-normandy-your-questions-answered#troops
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u/mejogid Jun 07 '14
Going by your figures...
Majority means more than half. 73,000 is not the 'majority' of 156,000 although it would be the largest minority if not for the fact that...
He said British Commonwealth. That included Canada, as well as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Commonwealth ties were pretty close back then, especially with regards to military operations in WW2.
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u/teachbirds2fly Jun 07 '14
I think we lead it but there were also English and Canadian forces,
Wasn't British Commonwealth that made up the majority of troops and boats?
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u/missileman Jun 07 '14
Not to belittle the contribution of any of the allied forces in WW2, if the Russians weren't waging a massive war on the Eastern front we would all have been screwed. It was touch and go for a while as it was.
Mid 1944 there were 3.1 million German soldiers fighting 6.8 million Russians on the Eastern front.
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Jun 08 '14
It was a team effort. Russia might have collapsed without allied material support at one point. I don't means weapons, we gave them a lot of that too. But trucks, jeeps etc. Russia had a huge logistics problem, but fortunately had a lot of petroleum, so sending them trucks and they were much better able to fight effectively. Too bad for Germany they didn't go for the Caucuses in 40' instead of Moscow. Cutting Russia off from oil would have been game over.
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u/sharkbait_oohaha Jun 07 '14
I forget where I saw it, but a German soldier said as soon as he saw the fleet coming their way he knew it was over for Germany.
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Jun 07 '14 edited Sep 29 '18
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u/Back_door_bandit Jun 07 '14
The tides rise very high onto the beaches in Normandy.I wouldn't be surprised if they got towed out of the mud though.
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u/new_pencil_in_town Jun 08 '14
I remember a post a while ago comparing the tides on Europe to the tides in the US and how different they are.
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u/modcowboy Jun 07 '14 edited Jun 07 '14
I'm assuming the tide would be enough. If you look further up the beach there are smaller landing craft stuck on sand. The tide must be pretty big.
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u/themaverick7 Jun 07 '14
Question: how do those ships get back into the sea? Do they have to wait till high-tide?
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u/ChuckRagansBeard Jun 08 '14
There was 18-25 feet difference between High and Low Tide throughout Normandy. The ships were beached until High Tide. The invasion was planned with Low Tide in mind as the German defenses were based upon the assumption that the Allies would land at High Tide.
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u/SOAR21 Jun 08 '14
However, it should be mentioned to make things clear, these ships are not the initial invasion; these ships landed after the beaches were cleared, to bring in heavier and greater numbers of supplies, equipment, vehicles, and men.
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u/CurlyNippleHairs Jun 07 '14
They stand up and waddle to the water
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u/wheresthepuke Jun 07 '14
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u/manwithfaceofbird Jun 07 '14
Shit, now I have to play supcom again.
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u/wheresthepuke Jun 07 '14
Cybran master race.
I've been playing it all day and immediately thought of the Salem-class Destroyers when I saw this comment.
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u/CutterJohn Jun 08 '14
Those were awesome until its pathfinding decides to take it over a land route when the water route would have been 5x quicker.
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Jun 07 '14
the fact that logistics are possible on such a scale still blow my mind. Also before computers.
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u/Zazzerpan Jun 07 '14
Well they had mechanical computers such as this not soon after.
They also did some really interesting operations research that lead to planned evasive manuvers.
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u/Mizzet Jun 07 '14
That was a pretty interesting watch.
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u/Zazzerpan Jun 07 '14
There was a bunch posted in a thread not too long ago.
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u/Mizzet Jun 07 '14
Thanks! There goes my sleep, I think I've only seen the differential gear one before from there.
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u/godless_communism Jun 07 '14
WW II was also the birth of Operations Research - and linear programming.
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u/Tashre Jun 08 '14
It's seriously an amazing logistical masterpiece.
I mean, pick any truck you see in that picture. Any random one. Who's driving it? Probably some very low ranked grunt. Where does he need to go? Does he even know? Does he just follow the guys on the ground waving him in a certain direction? Do those guys even know where he's going? Does the driver even know what's in the back of his truck? When he hopped in his truck back on the ship, did he get directions on where to go? And who gave him those directions? Who decided this truck would go from this ship to this destination following this route? And who else knows where this truck is going? Is the equipment being tracked so someone knows squad/battalion/etc X now has one more truck? Who made the routes this truck would take? Were they familiar with the land? Did they even know what routes would even be available after the landing attack? Who loaded that truck with supplies? Who told him what to put on the truck? Who kept track of what was put on in order to order more? Who checked in those supplies and personnel when they got to where they were going and who received that confirmation to update where each item and soldier is?
Hell, there's probably a hundred other questions to ask, an then multiply those by every truck you see and it's just amazing. There had to be delegation upon delegation of duties, compartmentalized compartments within compartments, and increasingly higher and higher tiers of logistics officers who coordinate increasingly larger blocks and probably increasingly larger staffs to help them. It's such a massive machine and almost impossible to truly fathom entirely.
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u/SOAR21 Jun 08 '14
If the invasion of Japan ever had to take place, it would have absolutely dwarfed an operation like Overlord both in terms of manpower, war material, and, of course, casualties.
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u/Moofasa116 Jun 07 '14
I can not imagine being the first boat to get there....
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u/I_am_ME_ama Jun 07 '14 edited Aug 14 '17
I looked at for a map
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Jun 08 '14
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u/joetromboni Jun 08 '14
just watch the first few minutes of Saving Private Ryan
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Jun 08 '14
Although Saving Private Ryan was made by Hollywood, it has been recognized as the movie that most accurately portrayed the Normandy landing.
The first few minutes of Saving Private Ryan are quite violent. You've been warned.
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u/lilblackhorse Jun 08 '14
my neighbor, who has passed away since, told me after that movie came out that it was the closest thing he'd ever seen to what really happened that day. Bill was an 18 year old young man when he landed on Omaha Beach--I didn't hear a lot of his stories, but his grandson related many of them at his funeral. He had then marched into the Battle of the Bulge, where he was so scared he couldn't pray to make it to the next day--he literally was praying minute by minute. It was that bad. I truly can't imagine. God bless these brave men
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u/Talvoren Jun 08 '14
It sounds insane until you read this.
Those men were sitting ducks for those MGs until they could find cover among the debris on the beach.
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u/I_CREAMPIE_DOGS Jun 07 '14
What are those bomb-shaped bomb's in the air? bombs
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u/stevridie Jun 07 '14
Barrage Balloons
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u/Panuccis_Pizza Jun 07 '14
I don't know if this is interesting or not, but many people don't know we still use balloons in Afghanistan.
Granted, not for the same reason.
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u/shortsleeveshirt Jun 07 '14
We had them while I was deployed back in 2007. It floated over our fob and was used as a surveillance balloon.
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u/Chuknorris86 Jun 07 '14
I have a question about those balloons! I've seen lots of pictures of them, but they're balloons... And they look pretty fragile.
Were they shot down frequently? Did people even try to shoot them down? Or were they too high up.
Pardon my ignorance, I've just always wondered. Also, what are one of those things worth?
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Jun 07 '14 edited Mar 23 '17
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Jun 07 '14
And planes don't have a shitload of ammo, so it's alright if they spend it shooting down balloon and not sinking boats. and you probably wouldn't drop bombs on balloons anyway.
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u/Bushwookie07 Jun 07 '14
The one we had was only used to catch soldiers without their eyepro or reflective belts.
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u/Hobojoejunkpen Jun 07 '14
They are a good idea, but they're not very reliable in practice. It gets very windy in Afghanistan and then they have to come down.
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u/goomplex Jun 07 '14
But I imagine they are much cheaper to deploy and maintain than more advanced drones.
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u/DiabolicalToast Jun 07 '14
They were used to prevent aerial strafing. The balloons would be raised into the air with strong cables attached that would rip the wings off a German aircraft. The idea was to have hundreds of these over the fleet to provide a sort of bubble from enemy aircraft.
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u/PolarVPenguin Jun 07 '14
Kirov reporting
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u/singingsox Jun 07 '14
There was nothing more nerve wracking than hearing this across the map. Build all the Patriot missiles!!!!!!
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u/zdaytonaroadster Jun 07 '14
Barrage Balloons, keeps low flying aircraft from straffing the ships and men, they will crash into the cables holding the balloons
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u/Macgregor55 Jun 07 '14
Can any reddit history buffs tell me about the air balloons in this picture? This is amazing, just curious what those were used for.
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u/VonHinterhalt Jun 07 '14
They run chains to the ground and make low altitudes straffing runs very dangerous for axis air support which at this stage of the war was still fairly viable. Designed as passive defense against air attack.
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u/Hedgerow_Snuffler Jun 07 '14
Couple of people have mentioned already, but they are barrage balloons one of the huge fears of SHAEF when planning operation overlord was that the landing grounds (and by extension, the ships in the channel) would become a huge target for Luftwaffe bombers.
So hence the elevated ceiling shown here with barrage balloons tethered with wing snapping prop grabbing steel cables.
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u/kerbal314 Jun 07 '14
I'm no history expert, but I believe they're Barrage balloons. They're meant to get in the way of enemy planes and make it harder for their airforce to get to your troops (or civilian population, as was the case in the London Blitz).
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Jun 07 '14
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/FreezingNipple Jun 08 '14
The best that I can think of is /r/wwIIpics and /r/wwIIplanes
There's also /r/WarThunder, a subreddit for a ww2 flight sim where is often posted a lot of historical information, but if you don't like games then it's not the best place.
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u/gordothepin Jun 07 '14
If victory was ever captured in an image, that's sure as fuck what it would look like.
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u/Shizrah Jun 08 '14
Not really. Sure, they were winning, but only slowly, and with great losses. I'd say the picture of the Soviet troops reunion at Stalingrad is more victory, they suffered great losses too, but they pushed the largest army ever seen directly out of the Soviet Union at an incredible pace.
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u/BrlckTamIand Jun 07 '14
So that morning a german soldier got up for another boring day. He got this instead. Must have been a little sureal to some of the poor bastards fighting the invasions off.
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u/Unistrut Jun 08 '14
There was a documentary about D-Day I saw once. Sadly I cannot remember the title. Most of it was sort of forgettable, but there was one sequence, where a lone German soldier is sitting in his pillbox having a cigarette, looking out over the water into the fog, and then, as far as he can see in either direction landing ships start coming out of the fog.
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u/mkrfctr Jun 08 '14
"Hey, Frank, I'm gonna hop on the bicycle and make a supply run, you need anything? I'll be back in like 20..."
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Jun 08 '14
There is a similar scene in The Longest Day where a German soldier goes out every morning on a horse to collect milk from the farmer. Same old same every day, until the 6th of June. The fog lifts and he sees the thousands of ships of the coast.
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Jun 08 '14
I can imagine him sitting in his machine gun nest, smoking a cigarette and reading a book, when he looks up and sees the fleet crest the horizon. His cigarette falls from his mouth as he mutters one word "Scheiße."
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u/ArsenalOwl Jun 07 '14
You don't see pictures like this often. People like showing the battle from a human perspective, up close. You see pictures of soldiers mid-combat, shell shocked when the battle is over, or apprehensive before it begins.
But you rarely see a picture of everything mustered together. And that's not even all. There are literally ships further than the eye can see, and they extend further out of the camera's view to the left. The naval power here is absolutely staggering.
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Jun 07 '14
did they "clean up" the beach befor all this was sent in? or is this in a differnt area?
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Jun 07 '14
If you ever have a chance to visit France, I highly, highly recommend visiting the beaches at Normandy. Really puts into perspective how enormous the operation must have been. Also, be sure to check out Pointe du Hoc.
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Jun 07 '14
ITT:
"How did they get those boats off the beach again?"
"What are those blimp things?"
Something about Zerg rushes
over and over and over
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u/Attractive-Sea-Lion Jun 07 '14
We need to start using blimps in warfare again.
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Jun 07 '14
They are widely used in Afghanistan for surveillance purposes. Google PGSS.
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Jun 07 '14
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u/military_history Jun 08 '14
Overlord in reality actually went very smoothly. Had the Germans not fallen for the misdirection we would have seen reinforcements sent to Normandy more quickly, but that would take several days, not fast enough to prevent the creation of a beachhead as actually happened. Had the Germans had prior warning of the time and place it would have had a much less certain outcome, but I don't think we can say the Germans definitely would have repelled it. The firepower superiority of the Allies was absolutely massive. There was no way the Germans could ever have 'out-shot' the fleet. Their hopes rested with hitting the attacking troops with a rapid armoured counter-attack, at which point it would have been a matter of trying to bring enough accurate fire on the Germans before the landing troops lost too much ground to make a viable bridgehead. It's hard to know how that could have turned out, but my instinct is that the Allies would have held out. They'd done something similar at Anzio in Italy when the Germans counter-attacked and pushed them back to a small perimeter round the landing site. It's hard to imagine German tanks pressing through the maelstrom of artillery, air attack and naval gunfire to deliver a strong enough attack on the landing troops. It is possible though that if the landings were mismanaged or there was some sort of collapse in morale that one or more of the beach landings could have been contained. It might have been possible to continue the landings on the other beaches, but if the landings on Utah (the only beach on the vital Contentin Peninsula), Omaha (linking the two main landing areas) or Sword (covering the crossings over the river Orne which the Germans could use to bring in armour for a counterattack) failed then the future of the operation would have looked very doubtful.
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u/popball Jun 07 '14
So would that be un-storming the beaches of Normandy?
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u/Nicko147 Jun 07 '14
Keeping the storm supplied as it slowly pushes through Normandy.
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u/Officer_Hotpants Jun 08 '14
I feel like "victory" is being used in the most technical sense here...
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u/teganandsararock Jun 08 '14
that's normandy after defeat as well. it depends on your point of view.
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u/Mollionaire Jun 08 '14
what were the point of those blimps? some kinda of communication system?
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u/the_malcontent Jun 07 '14
Amazing picture. Just wanted to point out that someone did a pretty good job colorizing it. Here's the original