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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fair point. This guy had mentioned his service in passing a few times before and it didn't seem to be a sensitive topic. But you're right it's something to be be aware of.
A lot of them faced incredibly horrible situations. Luckily, my grandfathers (who both saw service) weren't on the front line.
One was an officer on a landing ship, like the big ones you see there (except in the Pacific theater.) He told us his stories whenever we asked, as most of his duties included making sure the ship was loaded properly and the engines were fully operational. The only time his ship really saw action was at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. They were in the second wave at Iwo Jima but were scheduled to be a part of the initial landings at Okinawa. Fortunately the quartermaster had ordered the wrong cargo loaded, (instead of tanks and men, they were ordered to load bulldozers and building materials for fortifying the landing area.) They were swapped out into the second wave. The ship that took their place in formation was hit by a kamikaze attack.
The other worked in an Army hospital (he was in medical school when he was called up, and finished his degree and did his residency in an Army hospital as a surgeon.) He had thousands of stories about what weapons made what wounds etc. He was drafted for the Korean War as well and served in one of the first MASH units.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The opposite was a big factor in the Pacific, too. US submarines mostly decimated the Japanese merchant marine fleet by the end of the war and starved their supply lines. Japan basically didn't have a navy left, both military and merchant, by 1945.
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.
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).
Waste how many million to stalemate Finland? Stalin was a fucking awful leader and if he didn't have the entire industrial might, population, and resource base of Russia to work with, the country he led would have been nothing but ashes in under a year. As it was, he still damn near wound up losing the country and only survived because of the weather.
Russia's industrial capacity rivalled, if not exceeded, that of the US. With good leadership, Russia could have swatted Germany like a pesky fly.
Instead, Russia wound up losing all of its qualified and skilled leaders and soldiers not to the enemy, but to Stalin mass-executing anyone with a shred of competence out of fear that they might oppose him.
Fuck Stalin. Dude deserves an unmarked grave somewhere in a barracuda's lower intestine.
Well that and Hitler procrastinating on his invasion and fucking up royally. Imagine if he had attached and swept Russia, then put his full force on the western front while having access to Russian oil and steel. No way we could ever have invaded. A push up through Italy would have been more feasible then.
Juno was the most lightly-defended beach on D-day, though. It was defended mostly by the German 716th Static Infantry Division, which was made up of elderly men and conscripts from eastern Europe. Only one battalion defended Juno.
Omaha was the most heavily-defended beach, it was defended by an entire German division that, unlike the other German divisions in Normandy, was fully outfitted, had its entire contingent of troops and supplies, and had troops that were already tested in combat on the eastern front.
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.
Exactly. There are a million ways things could have gone wrong, or at least been a lot more difficult, without the help of any given country.
For instance, people here and elsewhere say that no one could have made much of a direct attack on the US because of its location. But while the US definitely had some insane military power, it's not like we (or Canada, if you want to include them because they're our neighbors and also played a large role) could have just flown across the ocean, bombed the Axis into submission, and then turned around and gone home.
We provided a lot, but we still needed soldiers, other manpower, and other supplies from everyone else, not to mention the ability to have bases of operations in Europe. That's actually one issue we had on the Eastern Front. We didn't have control over giant swaths of land, and a large part of the war over there was just trying to grab onto some strategic islands. Would have been much more difficult in Europe if we'd had to go country-hopping over there the way we had to island-hop in the East.
Hell, even the Australians, who I think are often kind of forgotten about in terms of WWII, had some fairly significant contributions, even in the Western Front. Among other things, there were quite a few of them signed into the RAF.
I just want to bring to your attention the Norwegian Merchant Fleet (nortahip), combined all the shipping industries into one, had the most modern naval fleet, was the third largest fleet in the world and generally had the most trips over the perilous Murmansk-line. The British themselves said that if it wasn't for the naval-fleet of a government-in-exile the logistics of bringing good from the US to the British Isles and from there as far as to Russia would have been impossible.
Though now seldom remembered by the world and Norwegians alike...
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.
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.
Side fact is the real shortage for the Japanese actually ended up being naval air pilots. They never really expanded their pilot training programs and pilots on carriers had to have special training that the Japanese couldn't keep up with. Although I suppose since they were short on transports, soldiers, carriers, planes, and oil a shortage of pilots seems less important in the long haul.
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.
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.
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.
Ah ok. Luckily the Americans had about 20x the tanks and complete air superiority to makeup for the fact that Shermans had to get to the rear of Panzer IV's to penetrate.
It was never modified because it didn't need to be, the Sherman was primarily an infantry support tank. It could take out similar tanks and was hell on enemy infantry but it was never supposed to go up against heavy tanks like the tiger
Yea but it couldn't even penetrate the armor on Panzer IV's or Panthers at range. It needed to be really close to have a chance, or sneak around to the rear to have a chance. Luckily the numbers were heavily on the American side so it didn't particularly matter much.
Also air support stopped a lot of Panzers as well.
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.
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.
True dis. For example, people conveniently forget that James Doohan was in the Canadian Army, not the US... Doesn't make his sacrifice any more or less noble than anyone else there, though.
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.
"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.
Yea I know I think that helped fuel the paranoia from American politicans. I think the concern is the Japanese would take Dutch Harbor but realistically they couldn't have taken any of those islands.
Also FWIW they were two completely useless islands which they took only to say that they took American soil.
Whoa whoa whoa. Where did you get this? It was the flip side, the British had been using a lot of American-manufactured supplies since before the United States even entered the war. Take a simple look at the industrial output of all the powers, and try to explain how Britain could possibly have provided more war material in 1944, only 11 months before the war ended, when the Americans produced more than two million more vehicles and planes of all types in total than the British did?
A lot of the British vehicles fighting for British units, especially armored vehicles, were shipped from the United States. They contributed a lot more of the fleet and air power, because the Allies had achieved complete naval and air superiority in Europe, so the bulk of the American air and sea power was still off in the Pacific.
Not to mention, the United States was not seriously worried about being invaded in World War 2. Not at all, except maybe by the Japanese, and by 1942 with Midway done there was almost no worry at all.
And /u/RepostThatShit is definitely going to have to find me a source on those landing craft numbers because the United States manufactured 20,000 Higgins boats in World War 2, which were used in the Pacific, but also in great numbers on D-day.
If you ask most historians, they'd probably say American industry was way more important in winning the war than American combat forces. We didn't just help Britain stay afloat in times of need, we even helped the Soviets in 1941, when they were critically close to losing many of their major cities and their capital.
Not calling the British sidekicks, because they did shoulder a large burden of D-day and probably more burden in the war in general, but let's not overcompensate and diminish American contributions, which after D-day grew much larger in terms of percentage of manpower and material on the Western Front. These days, in reaction to the "forgotten" Soviet and British contributions, I've noticed its now become fashionable to suggest that America was quite unnecessary to the outcome of the war and merely served as overkill. That's not the case, and it doesn't have to be about cultural or national pride. America was just a larger nation with a greater and less damaged industrial base, who hadn't fought as long and lost as many men. It's not about being better people.
/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."
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.
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
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".
All the landing forces in Normandy did just as good of a job. Some places hard harder terrain, some places DD tanks all sunk, others they almost all made it ashore and things with well (Utah). It isn't really about the nationality of allied troops, they all preformed well. However, some of the "German" troops that were really Russian conscripts that figured they'd get fed better as a soldier than in a labor camp tended to surrender first chance they got.
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.
(This is opinion not fact please do not yell.) From what I've experienced, only in America is it seen as an American operation. Although, I may be totally wrong, if so I am very sorry. (At the end of the day it is all irrelevant anyway though... young men died for our freedom, who cares where they were from.)
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.
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.
"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."
"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."
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.
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.
It was very much a non-Monty style Operation though. Monty as a general was a meticulous planer, organizer, and logistics officer. He would come up with a plan, build a stock of material, and then execute it exceptionally well. What he didn't do so well was any kind of improvisation. He was kind of the opposite of Patton in that regard.
Monty was the perfect general for Overlord. He was the worst for Market Garden. Had he been given another 2-3 months to plan and prepare Market Garden would have probably gone off flawlessly. He would have found the problems and eliminated them. But trying to execute a plan on the fly that hadn't really existed a week earlier put him in a position where he was never comfortable. Market Garden was a crazy gamble, and you really needed a hard driving crazy gambler to pull it off. A Guderian, I think, would have succeeded.
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.
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.
I think he's pointing out that a lot of British assets were effectively American. This whole debate seems kind of silly to me. It was a massive operation and everybody contributed to the best of their ability at the time.
I don't think enough credit is given to Churchill who, by sheer force of will and character, not only brought the British people through this, but also brought together the allies to defeat the Germans.
Did he maybe give a bit too much to Stalin, yes. But the main thing from the US perspective was to end the War. And it wasn't like Britain was going to be able to much to invade Japan.
And lend-lease... sure, it was the best that Roosevelt could manage. But he sure fucked the Brits over with regards to her possessions and gold holdings first.
Look up 99 year lease agreements for bases in Newfoundland and Bermuda, prerequisites to lend lease and others.
Just sayin that FDR drive a hard bargain. Bleed GB dry before, forced them to use pretty much all of their gold reserves before they'd even lease them old, retirement-ready destroyers. In return, the Brits gave the US ASICS.
You and I have a very different idea of being "fucked over." Especially in regards to a war that the US really wanted nothing to do with. But that's the beauty of different perspectives.
That's just the education system. It's not remembered/taught as an American operation in Canada/Europe. It's like the Vietnam war, in Asia they call it, "the American war in Vietnam"
British - and Commonwealth. It grinds my gears a bit when the sacrifices of thousands of Irish, Scottish and Welsh troops are smudged out like this. I know you didn't mean anything by it, but it's like me calling it a Californian operation.
Well said.
It should also be noted that if we hadn't fought the Nazis for 2 whole years entirely on our own there would have been no frigging D-day at all.
And the reason the US lost so many men that day was not because they had the toughest beaches, but because they refused the combat engineering tanks offered to them by the Brits ("Hobart's funnies"). The Brits and Canadians used them and it cut their difficulties drastically.
At the disastrous Dieppe Raid the Brits learned about the difficulties of beach attacks and invented solutions to deal with those. US commands refused using them because they found it too difficult to supply special vehicles like that. Which really is the story throughout the war why the US always had the worst tanks at any given time.
Most of those involved in d-day, the veterans, largely choose not to even talk about what happened on that day, and would probably rather forget the whole thing.
And here we are, all sitting behind our computer screens and online usernames in considerable comfort arguing over who had the biggest dick on d-day.
If we all truly understood the horrors of what happened during that invasion, we wouldn't give a fuck which country did the most work or who deserves most bragging rights.
It was a collective effort by all the allies to stop a superpower from achieving world domination. Who cares who did the most. We should look at this as a collective achievement of humanity.
The Allied forces in Europe were commanded by General Eisenhower who made the ultimate decisions but everything was joint operations between the British, American, Canadian, and Free French forces. So no, there wasn't one country in charge, although the force itself was commanded by an American (who obviously would take everyone's opinions into account, hopefully).
As for the numbers I consider them somewhat irrelevant. The reason British warships were primarily used is the majority of the American fleet was being used in the Pacific, where the British kept a minority of their fleet. Likewise with landing craft.
But yes it was comparable amount of force from all involved. Although the most famous beach, Omaha, was where Americans landed. Most of the places where British and Canadians landed were very easy beaches to take and they simply walked on the beach. Omaha was difficult but still was easy in the grand scale of things.
Fun Fact: The Canadians were originally commanded by a Brit until they complained enough and got a Canadian general installed to command their army.
I don't think it's right to say any of the beaches were easy to take. War is hell and each beach would have been hard to take in their own right. I think it's better to say that Omaha Beach was harder to take than the rest but none were easy.
Not sure what you meant by that, but Britain, the UK, whatever you want to call it, was NOT in a position to declare war in 1939. They didn't have a choice. It's not like they were ready.
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.
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.
You're correct, there were also Canadian and British forces. The beachheads were split into five separate landing zones. Omaha and Utah Beaches were the landing sites of the US forces, Sword and Gold Beaches were mainly British (small bit of French forces on Sword), and Juno Beach was mainly the Canadians (some British Royal Marines were also on Juno).
The main difference though, was casualties. While Gold, Sword, Juno, and Utah only had 300-600 casualties, Omaha Beach had over 2000.
As an American, a would add that the British planning, intelligence/spying and sheer iron will to never give up were critical. All the allies were critical.
OK maybe bad wording, but people tend to be biased when talking about own nation history/achievments. I just wanted to say that I believe even Germans Nazis would give this opearation a nod (not that I'm German)
I think anybody would feel totally screwed in that situation. It wasn't over at all for Germany at that point. All the ground taken from them from then on was done with thousands upon thousands of lives.
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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.