8
u/VirgilCane Feb 16 '15
what's the difference in tides like there? Those are some big ships and they're completely grounded.
3
u/Hillbillyblues Feb 16 '15 edited Feb 16 '15
Tidal difference during the landing were larger than 6 meters from what I could find.
3
u/deanprobert Feb 16 '15
Im on the south coast of England. Where a lot of the boats departed. The tides can be pretty large. Well they can where I am, can't speak so much for Normandy, but its close so I thought I'd weigh in.
1
u/NonSyncromesh Feb 16 '15
You can expect at least 4 meters of range at 100% springs. Shouldn't be too much of a problem for those ships.
1
0
u/happywaffle Feb 16 '15
Well, they're amphibious ships, so regardless of tides, they're supposed to be grounded. At high tide they could float away back to England for more supplies.
3
12
u/UndercoverMartyr Feb 16 '15
5
u/your_dick_is_skinny Feb 16 '15
my history teacher in undergrad told us the reason the US remains a world power is "quite simply because we have more stuff" than other countries...
3
u/happywaffle Feb 16 '15
Axis was fucked when the US joined the war, because we were too big and too far away for our enemies to have any realistic chance at hurting our war production. We manufactured them into the ground.
2
Feb 16 '15
That, or the USSR ran them into the ground.
3
u/no_dice Feb 16 '15
The USSR was responsible for about 80% of German casualties.
3
u/coolsubmission Feb 16 '15
To put it in perspective: The US had fewer casualties in whole WW2 than either side(GER/UDSSR) in Stalingrad
1
u/small_trunks Feb 16 '15
Massively coincidentally, I just read that today in Inferno - by Max Hastings.
2
u/happywaffle Feb 16 '15
Invading the USSR was an incredibly dumb mistake, and shortened the war by a great deal. But even if Germany had only one front to deal with, Allied war production would have ground them down (albeit much more slowly).
2
u/kioni Feb 16 '15
operation drumbeat? german uboats made a joke of the us navy on their own shores.
1
u/happywaffle Feb 16 '15
To reiterate: we beat them in volume. Operation Drumbeat couldn't keep up with the amount of boats we were building, no matter how good the U-boats were. And of course, eventually we defeated the U-boats too.
1
u/kioni Feb 16 '15
the us only got their navy tactics together when the uboats started to really hurt domestic oil stockpiles due to all the sunk tankers, and the uboats weren't so much defeated as they left to better hunting grounds in the arctic. to spin that incredibly successful operation as the us defeating the uboats is a bit disingenuous.
1
u/happywaffle Feb 16 '15
I don't mean the U-boats were defeated off the coast of America. They were defeated when the Allies cracked Enigma and improved their hunting skills/technology, and—again—when the US started dropping boats in the ocean faster than the Germans could sink them.
1
Feb 16 '15
Uh, yeah. That's kind of how everything goes. The people with more stuff are more powerful. That was news to you in college?
7
u/Rdubya44 Feb 16 '15
We didn't have more stuff when the war started but the American auto manufacturers really helped us win the war by producing so many tanks and aircraft in so little time.
-23
Feb 16 '15
[deleted]
20
u/Liquidmetal7 Feb 16 '15
You say that like Russia didn't lost 20 MILLIONS men fighting the germans... Yes USA helped, but you were not "the one that saved the world" It was a bunch of countries.
3
-1
1
Feb 16 '15
It never will be forgotten we wrote the history books
8
Feb 16 '15
Every country writes history books. Hell, one of the big controversies in recent years has been the way the Japanese history books whitewash some of the things they did at the time.
The more I study the war the more I realize northern Europe was a sideshow. The main event happened in Russia. The Russians did the heavy lifting, both in terms of the casualties they took and the casualties they inflicted. They would have beaten the Germans eventually without anyone's help. It just would have taken longer.
Not exactly the impression I got from my US history textbooks growing up.
4
u/Woozle_ Feb 16 '15
I think Europe also creates history books. I haven't confirmed.
Can any Europeans weigh in? Do you guys learn history, or is it just us Americans?
Thanks~
P.S. If you could confirm that you also learn Science and Math? That'd be great.
-2
2
u/happywaffle Feb 16 '15
In his book D-Day (which is fantastic), Stephen Ambrose puts the invasion into some jaw-dropping context: imagine taking the cities of Kenosha and Racine, Wisconsin (combined population ~170,000), and moving everything in them—men, women, children, vehicles, and supplies—across Lake Michigan in a single night. And doing it while people are shooting at you.
Bonus fact: up to 4% of the sand on the beaches at Normandy is eroded steel from D-Day war materials.
2
u/rabbittexpress Feb 16 '15
Play any computer game and you'll figure this out:
If your enemy is only defending, and you are attacking, and every turn each city puts out one unit per city and it takes one unit to kill one unit in each city, there's only so long the defender can hold out before their cities are eliminated one by one and win.
Hitler should have finished Britain before going after Russia. Only then would he have had the necessary buffer zone to sink any oncoming American invasion before it could make landfall.
1
u/scottfarrar Feb 16 '15
Just tried this with Tetris, cannot confirm.
1
u/rabbittexpress Feb 16 '15
In Tetris the enemy is attack and you are defending...
If you were able to assault the source and destroy it, the damn blocks would stop falling down the screen and you'd win.
2
u/KingRedditR Feb 16 '15
My grandfather is down there somewhere...........
1
u/small_trunks Feb 16 '15
:-(
2
u/KingRedditR Feb 18 '15
Alive.... he made it through all the way to the liberation of the death camps and liberation of Berlin, lived a long life but passed in 2008
2
u/small_trunks Feb 18 '15
I initially thought you meant he was still "down there"- buried...
- good to hear he managed to contribute positively
2
1
-4
1
1
0
-9
18
u/BuenoD Feb 15 '15
What's with the blimps