WWII Beach Landings

[Centennial]

How come they didn't use smoke to block/obscure the vision of the machine gunners so they couldn't concentrate fire on the LC doors when they dropped??

[piller]

I don't know. Maybe they tried it. There are still a few things about that particular Historically Significant day that I probably haven't heard or read.

[harry]

I would guess that smoke would also hinder targeting from the sea.

[wm]

I'm not certain but I am just guessing they wanted to maintain a clear line of sight for the ships to fire upon the Germans. They had bombed from the air and shelled from the sea with the intention of taking out all the large gun emplacements but they knew they would miss some of them. After the infantry hit the shore they would radio back which emplacements were still a issue and destroyers and cruisers would then given naval support fire. That task would have been nearly impossible with our troops so close to the enemy if the beach had been obscured by smoke.

Honestly I'm just speculating here but that would be my guess.

[Paladin]

It only works when the weather is right.

[Hawkeye2]

The destroyers of DESRON 18 went to within 800 yeads of the beach taking out gun emplacements and machine gun nests with everything from 5" on down. Some of the Destroyers only drew 11'.

[Grizz]

I always thought they lacked close air support to suppress the gunners on the tops. a couple dozen warthogs would have saved a lot of lives.

[Centennial]

I didn't know that about the Destroyers.
With 9,000+ casualties on the beach and in the water. An average man has 6 gallons of blood.
At 4 gallons x 9,000 = 36,0000 gallons. No wonder the water was red for along time afterwards.
What a horror our soldiers had to see, smell, hear, and witness.
For comparison Chicago only needs 40 gallons of green dye to color the river for St. Patrick's Day.

[harry]

I didn't know that about the Destroyers.
With 9,000+ casualties on the beach and in the water. An average man has 6 gallons of blood.
At 4 gallons x 9,000 = 36,0000 gallons. No wonder the water was red for along time afterwards.
What a horror our soldiers had to see, smell, hear, and witness.
For comparison Chicago only needs 40 gallons of green dye to color the river for St. Patrick's Day.

The average man has 10 pints of blood, not 6 gallons

[Bruce Scott]

There were some efforts to provide smoke cover:

342 Sqn - "Group Lorraine" - Boston IIIA - 2nd TAF - 2 Group. Part of 137 Wing. Based at Hartford Bridge Hants. The Squadron's D-Day task was to spread a smoke screen intended to hide American landing craft and armour from the German guns on Omaha Beach. The Air Officer Commanding 2 Group, Sir Basil Embry, stated:

"On the morning of D-day itself, our Mitchell Squadrons attacked with great accuracy gun positions directly threatening the approach of the great armada to the North Beach Head and our Bostons, flying at sea level, laid the smoke screen over the invasion craft. From now on the task of the Group was to work more closely in unison with the armies which the air forces had helped to land."

http://www.raf.mod.uk/history/FrenchPar ... ayrole.cfm

[Centennial]

Harry , Thanks for the correction. I should of woke up and not run off before posting that.

Bruce , Thanks for that and then I stumbled onto this website with a old B&W photo from a landing craft showing smoke along the beach head, see it here:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... ml?ml=m_pm
(excerpt from the article)
Colonel George Taylor knew amphibious warfare. He had helped mastermind the Allied landings in North Africa, and he had led the 16th Infantry into Sicily. In that time, he had developed two strong opinions about any invasion: The beach was death and inertia was the mortal enemy of success.

“In a landing operation, there are two classes of men that may be found on the beach,” he wrote several months before D-Day, “those who are already dead and those who are about to die.”

This notion was never far from his mind, almost to the point of obsession. On the beach, men were like penned animals, just waiting for the slaughter. Taylor had already seen too much death in this war and he had no wish to see any more. His troops were like family. The idea of a beach choked with their dead, shattered bodies was horrifying. Taylor was an unambiguous, rather clear-thinking man who believed that excellence came through simplicity. In the aftermath of one pre-invasion exercise back in England, Gen. Clarence Huebner, who would lead the storied 1st Infantry Division in the assault on Omaha Beach, had huddled with his commanders for a critique. One by one, they spoke glowingly of the training exercise, especially the overall plan. In stark contrast to his colleagues, Taylor, Huebner’s deputy, said that such a plan would never work. “Why not?” Huebner asked.

“Because it’s too darned complicated,” Taylor replied curtly.

He was a thinker and a doer, the sort of soldier who felt equally comfortable in a front-line foxhole or a seminar room at an Army staff college. “He was a good officer and really should have been a general by then,” Private Pete Lypka, who had served under him since Sicily, said, “but he had a habit of saying what was on his mind in as few words as possible. He was no apple-polisher.” Taylor knew that the true antidote for slaughter on Omaha beach was rapid movement, though he admitted that maneuvering against powerful defenses “was almost impossible in modern combat.”

The 45-year-old West Pointer had spent more than half his life in the Army. Shades of gray crept over his close-cropped hair now, and crow’s-feet spidered from the corners of his penetrating blue eyes, though his face retained a boyish sheen. Like many other effective combat leaders in the Army, he was diminutive in height at five feet seven, but somehow large in physical presence. An infantryman to the core, he was steeped in the commonsense world of field soldiering, both peacetime and wartime. “Beneath all the officer veneer,” Corporal Sam Fuller wrote, “Colonel Taylor had a heart of gold. I loved the guy.”

Col. George Taylor led the first wave of troops on Omaha Beach. | U.S. Army

Taylor loved the Army, though his fertile mind had generated several dozen ideas about how it could be, and should be, run much better. One idea stood above the others. Taylor believed that senior officers were too distant from soldiers, too reluctant, or perhaps unable, to teach and show their subordinates what to do, especially in combat. “What we lack, and need more of, is the worm’s eye view of leadership,” he once wrote. “No one ever tells the junior officer just exactly what he should do, and how he should do it.”

As Colonel Taylor, in charge of the very first wave of troops, approached Easy Red—the code name for a sector of coastline in the center of Omaha Beach—with the rear command post at 8:15 a.m. on June 6, 1944, he was determined to do just that. In this circumstance, he was certain that this would mean getting them to move, so this notion preoccupied his mind. He knew he would be greeted by sights of carnage, destruction, confusion and inertia. Indeed, the evening before, aboard the USS Samuel Chase, Taylor had told war correspondents Don Whitehead, Robert Capa and Jack Thompson, “The first six hours will be the toughest. This is the period during which we will be the weakest. But we’ve got to open the door.”

His words were prophetic, probably more so than even he himself appreciated. When he and his command group landed, the various inland fights were raging in full force. Much of the beach was still under intense fire from German artillery, machine-gun nests and mortars.

Taylor’s rear command post consisted of two boats, an LCM and an LCVP. Unlike many that day, the two boats landed without loss, though they were under machine-gun fire. Taylor and the others waded, under fire all the way, about 50 yards through chest-high water to the beach. “It was a helpless feeling wading while shot at,” Taylor later said. When he reached the beach, the scene that greeted his eyes was even grimmer than he had expected. Wrecked Higgins boats floated aimlessly on the crashing surf. The water was colored a muddy pink from blood; the sand was dotted and splotched with lines and circles of crimson. Body parts—everything from arms and legs to heads and fingers—littered the sand and stones. Angry-looking obstacles still honeycombed the beach, seemingly oblivious to the prodigious and costly efforts of the Gap Assault Teams to clear them. Blood-soaked bandages, discarded equipment and sand-choked rifles lay in random clusters. Dead and wounded men—some face-down, some face-up on arched backs—littered the waterline and the sands. Other figures lay huddled at the bank of shingle just above the tide line. Some looked dead. Others howled for medics. Several tanks were burning or immobilized. Mortar and artillery shells exploded—oily puffs of smoke, dust or sand floated in the wake of the explosions. Bullets snipped against the sand and stones of the beach."................to page 2/3

[samb]

Thank you for sharing.