Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire D-Day Normandy question

Why didn't the Allied forces use aircraft to strafe and soften the defenses along the beaches at Normandy before we dumped all those men off on the sand?

I am waiting to find out too.

They did for months. German bunkers were bomb proof. They bombed bridges going to Normandy, railroads. etc. Then the battleships pounded the area the night before. Germans were just dug in good with concrete bunkers several feet thick with reinforcing. It wasn't called the Atlantic wall for nothing. The bombing was done with mostly medium bombers like B-25's, British Mosquitos, etc. 4 engine bombers were bombing Germany. They pounded the area for about 2 months prior. They were going to land in May at low tide, but the weather was bad, had to wait until June.

Read Eisenhowers book, "Crusade in Europe" A good book that covers our involvement as well as the politics Eisenhower had to go through. He did not want to invade Italy, but Churchill insisted. Took 1 million American and British troops against 500,000 Germans and about three years to work up the boot. Eisenhower wanted to use these troops in France and get to Germany quicker. Northern France was easier for tanks to move unlike the mountains in the middle of Italy . Those extra million men could have filled the gap at the Battle of the Bulge and we could have moved into Germany even quicker. Italy's navy was sunk, and their air force destroyed. They after we took Sicily, were isolated and out of thee war.

Churchill also wanted to invade Greece and go up the middle of southeastern Europe. Churchill didn't want them to fall under Soviet control. However, mountains, rivers, and twice or more the distance to Germany. Ike won out on this, and it was northern France.

France also had a better road and rail system. Even though bridges were bombed as well as rail yards. They were repaired as we moved across France. It was also quicker to offload supplies at their ports as well as from England and get them to the Front.

There's this thing called WEATHER and TIMING!!

Low lever cloud cover moved in before daylight and the invading troops had begun to move and rather than take a chance on killing our men the USAAF was told to go inland 3-5 miles and dump their loads!!

My uncle swam to the beach on D-Day through burning oil. He was probably glad he wasn't being strafed by his own air force as well. He was scarred from his shoulders to his waist for the rest of his life. Recuperating from those wounds kept him from being trapped with the rest of his unit at the battle of the bulge, however.
Jerry

Excellent post, as was the next one. Please recall how crappy the weather was the days preceding D-Day. No VFR. I've been to and walked the beaches. One stretch of Omaha beach was defended by only 38 Germans in fortifications that were bomb proof and strafe proof. It didn't take many Grermans in those bunkers to do our boys wrong.

The German bunkers took a lot of punishment during the days following D-Day. Jabos (P-47s) firing white phospherous rockets did a number on their inhabitants.

Weren’t the landing areas top secret? From what I understand the allies were trying to decoy the germans into thinking the invasion would be elsewhere.

We hammered everything from Calia to Cherboug everyday the weather allowed.

It would seem the lesson learned from million round barrages in WWI and the pre-invasion bombardments of some dozens of islands in the Pacific is that artillery is relatively ineffective against reinforced fortifications. You can make a lot of smoke and noise and destroy everything on the surface but the guys hiding down behind several feet of dirt and concrete just wait it out and then scramble back to their firing positions as soon as the bombardment lifts. You might get some bunkers with direct hits but overall most of them survive.


Although I wonder what Ike could have done with a couple of squadrons of F-15E Strike Eagles and a good supply of precision guided munitions flying right into the firing ports...

We did.....but to keep the invasion point confidential we also had to bomb all of the coast line along Northern France....and as noted, the Germans were well dug in and bunkered

Eisenhower's book is excellent....Crusade in Europe....well worth the time to read it....it tells about Montgomery and De Gaulle.....Seems the Germans was not the only thing Eisenhower had to fight!

Wow. Just wow.

Reference Iwo Jima, also... Pounded the crap out of that island with thousands of tons of ordanance, and still.... it didn't flip over....

A good friend, now dead, was in on that one. He was not one of the 12 men in his (Marine) outfit (400 men? ) who walked off the island on their own. Claimed he stuck his finger out of his foxhole to test the wind, and the effers aimed a mortar at it....

I remember reading that the aerial bombardment done on D-Day missed their targets on average by 2 miles or more because of the bad weather and pilots were afraid of committing fratricide.

Hell with hitting specific German bunkers, we couldn’t even hit the beaches with artillery and aerial bombardments to make fighting holes in the sand. I remember one documentary that had said that one of their target areas didn’t have any bombs fall within a few miles of what they wanted to hit. It’s incredible to watch some of those multi day bombardments from aircraft, artillery and naval barrages and think that ANYTHING survived, let alone most survived the incredible tonnage that fell on and around them.

Clouds and WX were a problem that hamstrung our ability to use our resources to their fullest.

My Dad flew B-25s as a navigator and bombardier on D-day. His group's job was to bomb the beaches, etc. The maps and directions they were given at briefing that day had the bombers drop their bombs one mile inland. Another military fuster cluck.

As mentioned earlier in the thread. Blue on blue was a very real concern and they biased targeting on behalf of preventing it but alas it also made it pretty ineffective. The one notable exception was a strike of B-26's who decided they could hit what they aimed at and went in at the beach low. A good story at this link.

https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/mission-utah-beach-180972310/

Interesting thread here. I tend to believe that they wanted the Germans to think the landings would be someplace else. They knew it was coming but couldn't be sure where it would happen. Although not all the heavy artillery was in fortified bunkers overlooking the water. Some of it was inland a ways and not fortified or lightly fortified. My late father was a 19 year old aboard a light cruiser that had been given the location & distance of some of those gun emplacements from the coastline. Their shelling was able to take out several of them. From where that cruiser was my dad said that as far as they could see ( even with binoculars ), the invasion armada stretched to the horizon.

I can't imagine that anyone hasn't watched "The Longest Day", but if not, be sure and do so.

Thanks for the responses, guys. Interesting stuff.
If those boys could have just had a couple of A-10 Warthogs providing CAS for them.....