Posted on 06/11/2007 12:17:14 AM PDT by LibWhacker
You should study moer history. There were a few bomb plots against Hitler led by some very high level officers.
I just got back from a visit to Normandy. Omaha and Utah were the most treacherous. Omaha is a wide flat beach below a hill. It was obvious that the Germans were able to pick our boys off like they were in a shooting gallery. I wonder if there may have been a better way to invade instead of storming the beaches on foot?
I was there in 2004. Started off in Bayeux, went to Arromanches, Point du Hoc, the American cemetary in Coleville Sur Mer, and finished off in St. Mere Eglise. An absolutely amazing trip- and you’re right, it really does render one speechless. I’d go again in an instant.
I looked, but I didn’t see anything on how the Beast survived a battle that ended with the Allies in control of the beachhead and all Axis troops there either dead, captured or on the run to the next line of defense. Did he break contact when he ran out of ammo or did he surrender when his position was overrun?
Also, from what I’ve read the US suffered around 2,400 casualties on Omaha, many from drowning, so claiming that he alone was responsible for 3000 is a stretch to my mind.
Whatever the truth, I’m just glad I wasn’t on that beach that day.
Michael Frazier
Wow!
Knocks the wind out of you, doesn’t it? Did you get to see the American cemetary?
ping a ling...
I would submit that it was the British First Airborne and the Poles that got left holding the bag.
MG was unusual for a Montgomery operation - he ususally arranged for Commonwealth or other non-British troops to bear the brunt - unless he had thought that the heaviest fighting would be closest to the front lines.
Cause most tanks can’t swim; even the Dual Drive (DD) Shermans couldn’t swim very well. A lot of ‘em swamped in the heavy seas.
One of the 5 (of 64 tanks) that made it to the beach, it appears. And it didn’t get off the beach.
Went to the American Cemetary. It was sad to see so many graves with no names.
Utah might have been worse if the first wave hadn't hit the wrong beach. The planned landing area was more heavily defended.
Today, if we lose one soldier, they want investigations and somebody's head on a platter. In all previous wars, thousands were thrown at the enemy with no thought it may have been done better. We wasted more people on a Korean hill than in a year in Iraq. Douglas MacArthur was a hero, and Peter Pace can't even get a hearing.
“Here rests in honored glory a soldier known only to God”. Makes me tear up every time.
Patton was still busy selling the very IDEA of armor. Rommel showed the world how to use it, but our Army’s career trajectory was either infantry or cavalry. Patton actually risked his career even pursuing the idea of a tank being something more than an infantry support vehicle.
The irony was, once Rommel had demonstrated what was possible, Patton became indispensible.
Patton eventually trumped Rommel’s achievement, and improved it by showing the world how to coordinate air power with tank attack.
Armor was a pretty new concept.
It’s funny, now that I think about it. Doolittle got courtmarshalled for all the fuss he put up insisting you could use air to bomb ships. Patton undergoes nearly the same fate over tanks.
The power of orthodoxy.
Patton, on the other hand, was excellent on a dynamic battlefield, but his attempts at set-piece assaults (Nancy and Metz, as I recall).
Montgomery was almost always willing to let the Commonwealth troops bear the brunt of the fighting, being more judicious in his use of British troops.
The incident was off Slapton Sands in Devon, April 1944. Two German E-Boats stumbled across a group of fully loaded and unprotected LSTs on a training exercise. About 800 US troops died.
I too hold no ill toward this man, he did what he was asked and had to do.... I cannot imagine being in his place.
When battle becomes simply slaughter, and you keep firing anyway.... what that has to do to ones psych. For 9 hours, I am sure I would have been crying as I fired long before I ran out of ammo, and been praying to God that they just leave rather than force me to keep killing them.....
And its things like this that drove to the creation of the laser guided munition.
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