Hello CaptSquid, 
You make a fair and valid point. Though having seen the terrain overlay maps in various books, it occurred to me that some of the “Funnies” could themselves have made the necessary breaches in the seawalls to form a couple of beach exits.
However, from nearly 70 years onwards, it is easy to make that claim for it is hindsight. Those present in the hour of decision had not the time we have to consider such matters in great detail.
Respectful Regards, Uyraell.
On OMAHA beach no boat groups landed according to plan no bombardment of the beach happened the rocket boats missed their mark, and the Infantry through espri de corps achived the mission, My Grandfather said himself that if the navy hadnt come into the beach and shelled the enemy almost point blank the beach would have folded like a house of cards, the Navy saved the day along with the very brave men who fought their way off the beach. To this day I have tried to point out some serious errors in every written history to date as the story of EASY RED FOX GREEN is terribly flawed.
How a Company of 157 men dissipear into d-day history with 3 men KIA and 28 WIA while being the biggest body of 2nd batalion 16th regiment troops in Colleville on D-Day, I’ll never know.
People who want to understand war first need to understand the cruel reality of war, it makes no sence it’s just the way it is.
Sometimes the truth is right under our noses.
The bulldozers that landed in the second & subsequent waves on Omaha beach were to make the breaches in the shingle or seawall. Of sixteen arriving in the early waves four were able to reach the shingle. The others had their operators killed or were damaged by enemy fire & mines.
There was a substantial shingle and AT ditch at the upper edge of Sword beach. Bulldozers, facines, and prefab bridges were used to make vehical crossings there.
The other funnies would have been usefull after the beach and shingle were crossed, as all the buried mine fields and weapons positions were above the shingle. However they would have faced the fundamental problem of the morning, of getting across the beach and shingle while under fire. The same problem existed on Sword beach & it had the highest losses of the British beaches.
Thats been substatiated by the hundreds of the men who fought there & later interviewed by historians or who wrote their account later. There should have been a Naval Gun Fire Spotting Team operating with every battalion in the first wave. I’ve found only the flimseist evidence that any of these six NGF teams were still functional after the first minutes ashore. Witnesses refer to radios lost in the surf, rendered inoperable after imersion in the water, or finding the entire team in their sector dead or maimed. This was a problem across the board for all radio operators and command sections. Surviving radio operators and commanders told of drowned radios, shot away hand sets, broken antenna, or dead operators.
After the intial prelanding attack the gunfire support ships shifted their fires to beyond the bluffs as per the plan. With communication gone it was impossible to redirect the NGF back down onto the face of the bluff where the enemy guns were. After about 80 to 90 minutes enough radios were restored that the situation ashore was finally understood & the ships redirected their fires. 1st Sgt Pressley of the 116th regiment ordered a found NGF radio brought to him & established contact with the destroyer Carmick at approximatly 09:00. He then directed his company mortars to mark the targets on the bluff in his sector for the Carmick. A few other leaders on the beach were able to take similar action and get the NGF targeted where they needed it. In one case a survivng M4 Sherman tank crew marked tagets for another destroyer with their tank gun, in another a infantry officer used tracer fire from a MG. At least one of the destroyers was able to spot the enemy gun emplacement though the cammoflage and haze on its own.
One thing that wasn’t off-target at Utah though were the air strikes. Precision attacks using various fighters and bombers, especially the B-26 Marauders flying unusually and uncomfortably low, pulverized the less fortified machine-gun nests and fighting positions effectively eliminating any serious infantry resistance…
Omaha was a very different story…
Indeed Omaha could have been different. The medium bomber groups that hit Utah beach were used to bombing from medium & lower levels. A large portion of the pilots had low level training. While they did not like the exposure to anti air craft fire at altitudes of 5,000 feet or less they did have experience to fly a mission at that altitude & below the overcast so they could see the target. The heavy bomber groups assigned to Omaha beach had zero experience at low or even medium altitudes naturally planned the mission for higher up. That left them above the overcast & trying to bomb off the clock and their radar sets. A second factor was the angle of approach to the target. The course set ran more or less from north to south. That made the east facing Utah beach paralle to the axis of attack, so if a bomb missed its target it would land on or near someone else. Omaha beach faced north so th bombs either hit it or fell on cattle. Dolittle who was overhead in a P38 that morning saw the heavies drop over Omaha and wrote later that he saw as soon as he dived below the haze that they had missed the target area.
As regards the B26’s and fighter bomber missions, I have heard odd tales over the years relating to dropped bombs skipping along the floors of a few trenches at Utah, and various German soldiery scattering to avoid same. Always been in two minds as to whether said tales were apocraphal.
We used to see 'skipped ’ artillery rounds occasionally. A dud with the fuze gone & lying at the end of a furrow in the ground. We also saw a few air bombs lying about the impact areas unexploded. Sometimes fuzes just dont work. During the pre landing bombardment of Betio island skpped rounds from the NGF ships were reported splashing in the lagoon a half dozen kilometers beyond the island.
So yes I can certainly see a 250 pounder tumbling across the trenches & bunkers amoung the explosions :shock: :o Tho I doubt anyone had time to scatter. German eyewitnesses remember being stunned by the airstrike & unable to move.
Here’s an interesting infographic type pic:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/metrobest/3707343662/sizes/l/
I have always wondered why, both in the ETO and the PTO, British Tallboy bombs were not used to collapse bunkers. It’s well known these huge bombs, weighing 12 tons, were operational by Aug. 44 and were made just for destroying such emplacments (and at a distance for some of them.)
Surely they could have been sped up a bit and been ready by June 6th!
Think of how well that bomb would have worked on bunkers on Iwo Jima and Peleliu, where the Japanese dug in litteraly all their men!
And the Germans at Pointe Du Hoc would been a very good target for Tallboys.
Deaf
Problem is that Tallboy and Grand Slam were extremely expensive and required very, very good pilots to drop them accurately (having to hit a pinpoint target from over 20,000ft). Bunkers just don’t justify that sort of effort - they were used at targets like U-boat pens, viaducts, tunnels and the V-3 emplacements. All much more valuable than a single bunker - which wouldn’t be hard enough to justify one anyway.
It should also be noted that Pointe Du Hoc was already savaged enough by conventional bombs as there were numerous craters when the Rangers arrived on June 6th and the Germans had already famously pulled the guns back as a result…
Direct hits with smaller bombs, even 500lbs. ones, on a bunker might not have caved it, but certainly would have been devastating to the gun crews inside. Also, many of the German defensive positions were not in huge concrete bunkers, but was a trench line and smaller sandbag fortifications for the infantry…
Just give the plans to the Americans and we would have mass produced the bomb!
My understanding of the Tallboys did not need a direct hit. And thus a fair number of Tallboys might just flat collapse tunnels like at Iwo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallboy_bomb
The bomb was designed to impact close to the target, slide into the soil or rock on which the target was built, and then detonate, transferring all of its energy into the structure, or creating a camouflet into which it fell. This ‘earthquake’ effect caused more damage than even a direct hit which penetrated the armour of a target, since even a burst inside a bunker would only damage the immediate surroundings, with the blast dissipating rapidly through the air. An earthquake impact, however, shook the whole target, and caused major structural damage to all parts of it, making repair uneconomic.
Deaf
They did - as the T-14/Mk.110, and later adapted it as the Tarzon radio guided bomb. The problem is that the only US aircraft capable of lifting it was the B-29, and the RAF only had a few squadrons trained up on it (who had other tasks on D-Day - flying very precise grids over the channel, dropping Window to simulate a huge convoy heading for the Pas de Calais).
Then dang it, why didn’t we use the T-14 in the pacific! We had B-29s over there up to our ears.
Industrial priorities probably - it’s only really good for very small, very hard targets (of which there were few) and required a very highly trained crew to drop it effectively (which the US was short of). Hence low priority and turned up late.
Don’t need to high precision. Pattern bomb the beach heads with 'em! Collapse all the bunkers near the beach heads of Iwo Jima would have helped alot! A dozen of them on Mount Suribachi would have taken care of that problem a few days before the invasion. All you would need is maybe 30 sorties. And we did have seveal B-24 raids right before the invasion so it’s not like the Air Force ignored them.
Oh well. We did what we did… and didn’t do.
Deaf
I don’t think they would have made much of a dent in Suribachi. That was just a dirty, sappers battle…
They aren’t nuclear weapons, but merely very large conventional ones. That gives them an effective radius of perhaps 100m against tunnels and the like, less against targets in softer ground. Small as it is, you would still need an enormous number against Iwo Jima - you’re much better off carpet bombing with 1000lb bombs. Remember destructive radius goes with something like the cube root of bomb size (the bomb dissipates it’s energy over a sphere in space) so big bombs are actually a very inefficient way of blowing something up.
The big bombs didn’t blow things up, it caused a mini-quake and collapsed things such as railroad tressels from a distance.
And sadly, they didn’t carpet bomb the Suribachi with, say, AP 2000 lb bombs.
Anything to collapse those bunkers. We knew, by the time we invaded Iwo Jima, that 16 inch shells didn’t do well bunkers (flat trajactory was the real problem.)
The Tallboys were designed to go supersonic when dropped. And thus penitrate alot.
And how ironic we didn’t use B-29s much since they just about flew over Iwo in order to go the the Japanese Mainland! In fact, the main reason we took Iwo Jima WAS for B-29s. Both to stop early warning and to give them a place to land in an emergency.
Deaf
Uh… not exactly. The original plan was for them to blow a hole under a building and the building to fall into the hole. They get called earthquake bombs, but don’t really provide one - they provide a shockwave instead.
Yes, but in hard rock “a lot” isn’t actually all that far - the bombs aren’t all that strong, unlike modern hard surface penetrators.
How many casualties would it have saved for the USMC, versus the number of casualties it would have caused to the entire US armed forces due to the increased availability of war materiel for the rest of the Japanese armed forces? That’s the calculations they made, and they selected to keep bombing Japan.