Posted on 05/26/2009 5:27:15 AM PDT by franksolich
In all descriptions of landings on Normandy, especially those on the Omaha front, one encounters cases of men being separated from their units. Of course; especially on the Omaha front, they all seemed to have landed--those who succeeded--in scattered fragments, bits-and-pieces strewn here and there.
Cohesion with those whom one knows, I suppose, is important for military morale and success.
Suppose one is a 19-year-old infantryman, suddenly in the hedgerows of Normandy, all alone. He is in a world he has probably never seen before, and one assumes his first instinct would be to find others like himself, who might or might not know what's going on.
He latches up with someone from another unit; a stranger, but at least another person from his own time and place, which is some comfort.
Through time and chance and luck, he and the other slowly latch up with others, until ultimately there's, for example, 16 or 17 privates, a couple of sergeants and corporals, and a couple of second lieutenants. All, or nearly all, from different units, all, or nearly all, strangers to each other.
And surely it must have happened more than a dozen times, in that mix being a stray U.S. sailor or British soldier, or a couple from the Polish, Norwegian, or Dutch who had gone along with the invasion of Normandy.
All these different people, with only two things in common; that they wish to stay alive, and that they wish to carry on.
One imagines--and please correct me if the imagination is wrong--everyone simply naturally gets in line behind the highest-ranking person, and proceeds.
And hence today's question--what happened after then?
Now, no one here was on the beaches of D-Day, so no one probably knows for sure what happened after then, but please at least speculate.
Here is this odd assortment of guys, from perhaps a dozen different units, all of them strangers to each other. The foreign nationals and the sailor excepted, was the policy to try to get the U.S. Army infantrymen back to their own units if possible (I suppose there were cases where such was not possible), or were these guys just combined with other strangers to make a full unit, to carry on for the duration of the war?
However, I've noticed that the brains of freerepublic combined with the brains of conservativecave, make interesting and illuminating reading, and so I suggest readers at one site check the responses of readers at the other site.
The problem is, readers at the other site are somewhat more slower than readers at freerepublic, to respond; this of course is due to that conservativecave is a mere little flea compared with the elephant of freerepublic, and so it takes more time over there.
Thanks to dutch508 over there, who answered yesterday's question the best way, I suppose, it could have been answered.
The only units scattered around like that during D-Day would have been the airborne units. Units on each beach were initially all from one division.
There were two American and one British Airborne divisions, The British drop zones were a considerable distance away from the American zones. I have never heard of British and American paratroopers running into each other. Certainly no Polish soldiers or Sailors.
There were a number of ad hoc units consisting of men from various units of the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions on D-Day. As far as I know, they were sorted out and sent back to their original units once a contiguous zone of control was established.
But Ambrose mentions incidents of American sailors stranded on the beaches, unable to get seaborne again, who were then immediately "drafted" into the U.S. Army infantry; that was covered in an earlier question.
Sorry, I omitted one reference.
Sailors becoming infantrymen was covered in the last half of the “who’s in charge” thread there.
I really didn't ask that question, but after talking with veterans over the years, some personal anecdotes indicated that they were returned to their units after the fight was over.
One vet brought up the point that it was Bad News to be seperated and attached to another unit. Since the officer of that unit viewed his men as "assets", the outsider was always the first guy given the dangerous assignment.
IIRC, the US paratroops were given “crickets”..simple clicker toys to use for a recognition signal..
Your query skips from the invasion beaches..to the hedgerows..in one sentence..there were several weeks between the 2 scenarios...
Professional civilian, remember; I thought perhaps the hedgerows were just some yards or half a mile or something beyond the beaches.
Sorry..I didn’t mean to sound snippy..The hedgerows began more than several miles from the beaches. The Norman farmers, centuries back, made stone berms, from the rocks they cleared from the fields, covered them with dirt, and planted trees and bushes. When a US tank attempeted to go “up and over” the hedgerow, the soft, lightly armored underbelly was exposed, and the German infantry was killing them with the Panzerfaust. A US tanker came up with the idea of taking the steel beams that the Germans had used to create obstacles for the landing craft on the beaches, and welding them to the front of the tanks...sumilar to a cowcatcher on the front of an old locomotive. There’s a name for this device, but I can’t recall it..The tank would drive forward, and it would rip a breach into the hedgerow..
That was my point. The only allied soldiers wandering around in hedgerows on D-Day were paratroopers, and maybe the occasional shot down pilot or French resistance.
The device of which you speak was an invention of one SSG Curtis Culin of the V Corp’s 102nd Cavalry Sqdn. It was made from German beach obstacles and nicknamed the “Rhino.” Between July 15-25th, when Operation Cobra, the breakout from St. Lo started, 500+ Rhinos were manufactured, enough to equip 60% of the 1st Army tanks that participated in the assault.
Other units developed their own versions of the Rhino, but all were ordered to be considered Top Secret by the 1st Army commander Omar Bradley untill the beginning of Operation Cobra.
Thanks....so maybe now I can duct tape Olympia Snow to the front of my SUV and drive it into a tree?
Works for me, but I suspect her carcass is as useless for this purpose as it is for most others.
I think so many were killed, it was a shock to the survivors...the disorganized remaining units struggled...regained thier senses and organization and led to the heroics of men like General George Patton, General Omar Bradley, and ultimately to the Presidency of General Dwight D. Eisenhoer. Great men in a great country!
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