Why was there no heavy armor landed on the beaches?
The US didn’t HAVE any heavy armor. The M26 Pershing tank didn’t make it to the battlefield until February of 1945. The most advanced weapon available was the M4 Sherman. A number of them were converted for amphibious operations, but none survived the swim to the beach.
US tanks couldn’t land because of the MILLIONS of tank traps the Germans had set up on the beaches. Armor couldn’t land until the infantry blew up or removed the antitank barriers.
Because the American generals blew off General Montgomery’s advice to use armor in assaulting the beach - Montgomery had the British Army develop specialized assault vehicles for D-Day and offered some to the American Army - they refused. For more details on this American fiasco, read the “Blitzkrieg Myth” by John Mosier.
And the good Lt. Col. may not have studied the British organized fiasco at Dieppe, where most of the tanks were never able to advance off the beach, and those few that did were fairly quickly abandoned.
OK, here’s your bonus for the night - a thread about British amphibian tanks at Normandy:
The FReeper Foxhole Profiles Hobart’s Funnies - January 9th, 2004 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-vetscor/1054522/posts
Here’s a general Omaha Beach thread:
The FReeper Foxhole Remembers D-Day On Omaha Beach (6/6/1944) - June 6th, 2003 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-vetscor/924248/posts
"DD tanks (for Duplex Drive) were amphibious swimming tanks developed during the Second World War. The phrase is mostly used for the M4 Sherman medium tanks used by the Allies in the opening phases of the D-Day landings in 1944. The swimming tracked LVTs had already been used in the 1942-43 Solomons campaign in the Pacific, swimming 2 1/2 ton trucks in the 1943 invasion of Sicily, swimming Ford jeeps appeared in 1944, and the Soviets even developed swimming tankettes in the 1930s --but swimming medium tanks presented their own design problems. The swimming tank idea arose when it was realised that the first waves of infantry that reached an invasion beach would be acutely vulnerable without the support of tanks. But if landing craft were used to carry those tanks, they themselves would be vulnerable to German heavy guns. The loss of too many landing craft would slow the movement of reinforcements from ships offshore and the invasion beaches would be choked with disabled and sunken landing craft. By giving tanks the ability to float, they could be launched from landing craft several miles from the shore and make their own way onto the beach. The DD tanks were one of the many specialised assault vehicles, collectively known as Hobart's Funnies, derived to support the beach landings. All were extensively used by the British and Canadians, but the DD were the only ones adopted by the American forces. It has been speculated that if the DD tanks were better used, or if some of the other vehicles had been used, that American losses on the beaches of Normandy, particularly Omaha beach, would have been far less."
A large number of the DD'd were sunk trying to get to the beach. The Sherman could not take out a Panther or a Tiger 1 in a heads up shoot out. Typically 2-3 Sherman were lost killing every German heavy tank. There is tons of stuff around about this. history channel, wiki etc.
The beach soil and rocks were way too soft for armor. The Sherman tanks that did land quickly got stuck and became death traps for their crews.
We did try to get tanks ashore. All of theses amphibious tanks sank as they came off of the transports because of the choppy water. I think one tank actually made it ashore.
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.
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.
If they had been launched much closer to the beach, then most of them would have made it to shore.
Because it sank, some general made the decision to launch the tanks way out and they went under in strong swells and on top of that rocket fire from ships which was supposed to land on the beachs and create craters for the men to hide in fell short into the sea