WWII

Am onto D-Day, also by Stephen Ambrose. A fairly weighty tome but have been ploughing through it over Christmas and it's really fantastic. Although D-Day is widely considered a great success, I'm now realising it could have gone a hell of a lot better! The air bombardment prior to the landings were of absolutely no help to the unfortunate soldiers who then came in under heavy fire, particularly at Omaha. I don't quite understand how they failed to bomb anywhere near the beaches, despite what has been said about cloud cover and fear of dropping short. Has anyone any insights?

Thirty Bills Unpaid said:

jnimhaoileoin said:

Am onto D-Day, also by Stephen Ambrose. A fairly weighty tome but have been ploughing through it over Christmas and it's really fantastic. Although D-Day is widely considered a great success, I'm now realising it could have gone a hell of a lot better! The air bombardment prior to the landings were of absolutely no help to the unfortunate soldiers who then came in under heavy fire, particularly at Omaha. I don't quite understand how they failed to bomb anywhere near the beaches, despite what has been said about cloud cover and fear of dropping short. Has anyone any insights?

The timing was off too. They were supposed to be landing just before day break.

Now this is another thing, presumably they decided to land during daylight so as to allow for the pre-landing air bombardment but given how little help this was, surely a lot of lives could have been saved by landing in darkness? Though I suppose at the same time, that would have made the naval bombardment more difficult...

mrussel1 said:

Fog of war I guess. The airborne drops were awfully scattered as well. It's kind of amazing that it succeeded. Many historians will attribute it to the lack of German communication (Rommel was celebrating his birthday or something back in the Fatherland). There is a theory of German military command which is that they were incapable of doing anything without the explicit command of leadership. So with Rommel gone, communication cut, the field officers were paralyzed. Who knows how true this is, but it's one theory on why they were so slow to respond to the assault.

Yeah Rommel was off celebrating his wife's birthday and most of the other generals were messing around with war games in Rennes. So in many cases it was the inability of the lower ranking officers to act without the approval of their superiors. Also it seems none of the Panzer divisions could go anywhere without Hitler's approval and apparently he was asleep and everyone was scared to wake him up! Really you start to wonder how the Germans got so far in the first place with that kind of leadership...

Watching a documentary on PBS America called Memory of the Camps. To say it's harrowing doesn't even begin to describe it. There's footage of the SS men and women burying the bodies, a job they were ordered to do by the Allied liberators. In theory I can see the reasoning behind this, the hope that they might come to realise and regret what terrible crimes they had perpetrated. However, all I see is Nazis being given a further chance to persecute their victims, as they show nothing but disgust and disrespect, manhandling the corpses as if they were bits of waste being thrown on a scrap heap.

Surely at the very least these wretched victims could have been given a proper and respectful burial? I understand the difficulty of dealing with so very many bodies but it was just so inhumane and seems like committing one final crime against them.

I know this is a subject not many will wish to discuss but I just needed to share my thoughts somewhere...