The Allied air and naval bombardments that were supposed to reduce opposition on the beach were ineffectual. The Germans had plenty of guns with plenty of ammunition and they were manned by crack troops. They had a clear view of the beach and their machine gun and artillery units had the landing area sighted in. In some cases the gunners could aim straight into a landing craft the moment the ramp dropped, shooting everybody on board. The landing craft were dropping their men well offshore, forcing them to wade or even swim in. It should have been a shooting gallery, but even in a shooting gallery if there are enough targets passing at once it is hard to get them all. However, the films I’ve seen of the landing did not show enough men coming ashore at once to make killing all of them before they reached the seawall and could mount an organized attack all that dfficult. Why did it succeed?
And then there was the attack on Pointe du Hoc. There was a pause between the bombardment and the guys landing and then they had to climb a 100’ cliff with ropes. By all rights this should have been a leisurely slaughter, with the Germans picking off each man as he crested the cliff, but it succeeded. How?
Just for a start, and I’m sure womeone more knowledgeable will be along shortly:
The fire from a machine gun is not a continuous stream. The individual slugs are seperated by length that is dictated by the rate of fire (rounds per minute) and the muzzle velocity (feet per second.) Now remember that the Germans are firing across a few hundred yards, and that the machinguns in question don’t really have all that high a rate of fire (at least, not compared to today’s weapons.) A sweep that would saw a building in two at twenty yards will have gaps between the slugs of a couple of feet at a couple of hundred yards. Given this, the gunners can’t simply sweep their fire over an area and hope for the best - the odds are with the guy being shot at. The Germans had to actually aim their fire. Take a good look at them in the next film you see, and you’ll notice that they aren’t all that well equipped as far as sights go. No sniper shots there.
The qustion comes down to putting more men into the area faster than the Germans could shoot them - a problem that can be handled mathematically if you know the ranges, field of fire, and rate of fire for the weapons and the sites involved. You can bet that the Allies knew almost to the man how many men they would lose in the assault - and how many they would have to land on the beaches for the attack to succeed.
Believe me, they knew before hand how many were going to die. They also had a pretty fair idea of what would happen if they didn’t do it, too.
Good planning. The Allied paratroopers who jumped in the night before the landings, despite being widely scattered, were highly effective in disrupting the Germans from responding as they should have. They captured bridges, cut communications, and eliminated artillery pieces (and the crews), and in general caused an awful lot of chaos.
Because the defenses were not nearly what they should have been. The soldiers manning the posts were, by and large, not crack troops, but the leftovers remaining after the best and the bravest had been sent to fight (and die) on the eastern front. Rommel was an aggressive tank commander, not a talented defensive thinker, and it showed in his planning. Plus there was the fact that he didn’t receive nearly the resources that he had requested in order to defend “Fortress Europe”. So the troops storming the beaches were confronted with obstacles that were difficult, but not impossible to surmount.
One other thing: The guns cannot be fired continuously.
The MG42 ate ammo like nobody’s business, often twice the cyclic rate (shots per minute) as most other WW2 machine guns.
Firing 1,200 rounds per minute heats up the barrel to several hundred degrees in only a few seconds. Keep up that rate for two or three minutes and the barrel becomes hot enough to “cook off” the round as it sits in the chamber, leading to an uncontrollable runaway.
If you manage to keep the ammo from cooking off, the hot gas from the cartridges and the constant passage of the bullets are still eroding away the barrel and it’s rifling. Too much wear and the accuracy suffers, a little more wear and the weapon jams.
Most “crew served” machine guns have a method to quickly exchange barrels- but this takes a minute or two at best, and obviously while it’s happening, your gun is silent.
There’s also loading time- putting a new belt in- and the fact that you (the gunner) have to put your head up in order to see, in order to shoot, and a tripod or bipod-mounted weapon inside a pillbox doesn’t let you dodge and weave very well. Your muzzle flash provides an excellent point of aim for your opponent to shoot at, and once a short section of beach is “cleared”- yes, at a heavy cost- as long as those on the beach have a ready supply of men, guns and ammo, it’s just a matter of overwhelming the other gun emplacements.
Static fortifications have been obsolete since about that day.
Okay, so why did the landing at Gallipoli fail? The Allies got lots of men onto the beach and they got (more or less) under cover quickly. There is no faulting the men’s bravery nor the willingness of their commanders to sacrifice them, yet they were stuck on that damned beach for months.
While we’re plugging books, my favorite is The Longest Day, by Cornelius Ryan. The movie is pretty good, too, but it takes longer to watch than it does to read the book…
The troops at Gallipoli actually made it a fair way inland. They were then forced back onto the beaches and surrounding hills by Turkish reinforcements.
Gallipoli differed from Normandy in that it was essentially just infantry-infantry with artillery support. The best infantry with the best position and most men dictated terms. The runners up dug in an prayed a lot. The Turks were the favoured team in the day. Normandy was infantry supported by paratroops securing a beachhead for tanks, artillery and air support. I imagine that if the infantry had been asked to try to take Europe with no armour and no aircraft the result would have been much the same as Gallipoli.
One problem with Gallipoli was the planners used inadequate maps. They didn’t have enough topographical detail so soldiers got held up by ravines that were not on the map that were practically uncrossable, that sort of thing. Also, the defenses and topographical features were mapped out largely from the water, so big guns may have been visible from the water, but the soldiers in trenches with machine guns were effectively hidden from view. They could see how high a feature was, but they had a more difficult time determining how far inland it was. That sort of thing. Last but not least, dysentery and foul water made their contribution to the misery.
…And it’s a good sized book! But reading it means you don’t get that long helicopter shot of the men advancing along the canal in–what town was it? Ste Mere Eglise? Fabulous shot! Makes wide screen worthwhile.
The parachute troops mentioned in a previous thread helped greatly in the success of the overall landings for the reasons stated but they weren’t the crucial factor in getting off Omaha beach.
As I remember the description in The Longest Day (forget about the movie as it is filled with the usual cinematic license) General Norman Cota had a lot to do with it. After being pinned down for a long time he finally stood up and said to those around him that if they stayed on the beach they would all die. The only way out was to get up an move toward the shelter of the bluffs ahead. And so in small groups, urged on by privates, segeants, lietenants, and various others, they finally made it off the beach and using cover afforded by the bluff’s terrain, managed to make it to the top of them.
It proved once more that a static defense can’t indefinitely ward off a determined assault.
Ridiculous nitpick, but: I’ve fired (and carried (and carried and carried and carried…)) the MG3 - simply a MG42 re-chambered for the NATO 7.62 mm round. The barrel can indeed be exchanged, but it takes nowhere near a minute - the gunner can change the barrel in 10-15 seconds without even moving from his firing position behind the gun. Apart from its weight and its ravenous ammo consumption, it’s an extremely user-friendly weapon. (Incidentally, field barrel changes often lead to impromptu rediscovery of the MG loader’s dictum #1: A hot barrel looks precisely like a cold barrel.)
I think there are several factors which made the landing at Omaha a success, albeit a coslty one.
Naval support fire. By about mid-day on the 6th, Allied destroyers were steaming just about as close as they could offshore, and were able to place directed fire on many of the German strong points. If I remember correctly, a few of the fire missions were sent from the beach via signal lamps. One fortification built into the side of a cliff was brought down when a destroyer shot away the rock underpinnings. This may be an eyewitness reference to that incident. Naval gunfire appears to have accounted for most of the casualties sustained by the German 916th Infantry Regiment that day. See Chapter 8 of The Cross-Channel Attack. (There’s an excellent photo of the extreme right of Omaha beach and Ponte du Hoc on this page. The caption, however, is somewhat incorrect.)
The success of the other landings. When it appeared that the landings at Omaha had been contained, the 352nd and 716th divisions concentrated their efforts against the British and Canadian landings, thus denying reinforcement to the German forces at Omaha. In particular, the 441st Ost battalion collapsed in the face of the British advance off Gold beach and required immediate support (see Chapter 8 listed above). Slowly but surely the Germans were worn down at Omaha during the course of the day.
Concentration of force. Despite the mounting casualties, the forces deployed at Omaha overwhelmingly outnumbered the defenders. Consider this: in the “Scottish Corridor” chapter of Six Armies in Normandy, John Keegan points out that due to the “two brigades up,” or “triangular” formation of a division, in which each formation of the division kept one of its three sub-formations in reserve, there were really only perhaps seven hundred men attacking across the entire divisional front (here’s an earlier thread in which the mathematics of the “triangular” system of reserves is discussed).
That didn’t happen at Omaha. Aside from medical, signals, and headquarters troops everyone who hit that beach was a fighting soldier. By noon the Americans unquestionably outnumbered the Germans, even though they were pinned down.
Individual initiative. General Norman Cota’s famous remark, “Gentlemen, we’re being killed on the beaches. Let’s go inland and be killed,” was probably a statement of the obvious. Small units and individual soldiers quickly realized that it was equally dangerous to stay put as it was to move ahead. So they moved. Some eyewitnesses give a lot of the individual credit to Norman Cota himself. One (perhaps less endearing) portrait of Cota appears here:
By the 7th of June, things had stabilized. Though the first three waves at Omaha were badly mauled, later landings actually hit the beaches where they were supposed to land and those troops by and large got safely inland–not very far, but far enough. After that point, it was a logistical game, and with theater-wide air and naval supremacy the Allies were playing with a stacked deck. Within six weeks they landed enough troops, fuel, and equipment to begin their breakout, and the Germans had to fall back.
The Department of Defense’s official history of the Omaha landings is now online: Omaha Beachhead.
But how about Pointe du Hoc? That just seems impossible to take from a determined defender. Weren’t the Germans’ hearts in it? I know mine wouldn’t be, looking out on a Channel carpeted with ships full of people who would really prefer that I surrendered. But those guns weren’t guarded by the middle-aged reservists and occupied-country conscripts who made up the less effective units, fragging their officers and surrendering the first chance they got. (How many languages were the words, “That guy is full of shit! Let’s kill him,” spoken that day?)
That’s just it. It “seems” impossible, but it turns out it isn’t so.
Sure, there are positions that can’t be forced with the resources that are assigned, but more forces will turn the trick. It is so unlikely that all assault forces will be killed that it is the same thing as impossible. The solution is, as everyone is taught, don’t bunch up and keep moving forward.
This isn’t always possible, but at Pointe du Hoc it was.
I’m not so sure that Ponte du Hoc wasn’t guarded by older reservists and foreign conscripts. This article implies that it was manned by members of the 716th Division. That article claims that the defenders numbered in total about 200 men, 85 of whom were artillerists. However, this article claims that those 200 men were from the 352nd, with elements of the 716th also nearby.
But the real reason why the attack succeeded is probably also given in those articles, as well as the official history I cited above. The Germans assumed that the position was impregnable from the sea. When they realized what was happening, some Germans moved to the edge of the cliff and fired down, but
It seems as if the Germans moved inland to defend the Pointe from fixed positions, leaving only a few soldiers to defend the bluffs. They, in turn, were driven away by naval gunfire, covering fire from the beach and, at least briefly, a preposterous contraption cobbled together from a London Fire Brigade ladder, a couple of old Lewis machine guns, and a DUKW.
True true true. One of my pet peeves with movies like SPR (Saving Private Ryan) is the first 15 minutes of the movie where they showed the machine gunners on Omaha Beach operating their weapons with a non-stop uninterrupted stream of fire for minutes on end. This is not only totally unrealistic, but it is virtually impossible to pull off in reality on a real gas-operated machine gun.
In reality, a non-stop uninterrupted rate of MG fire would be impossible to sustain as a quick burnout of the barrel would inevitably render the weapon inoperable within a matter of minutes. Also, no right-thinking machine gunner would render his gun inoperable in such a manner by firing uninterrupted bursts.
Trained machine gunners fire properly spaced, interrupted bursts of six rounds at a time in order to control their rate of fire and the heating of the barrel.
Only a moron would fire a 100 round belt of ammo in one pull of the trigger, or fire a machine gun for minutes on end without releasing the trigger.
Also, this would be impossible to do, b/c in reality, MGs jam quite often and never quite work as well as you want them to (only proper maintenance and optimal conditions will ensure that gun will function as advertised).
An experienced gunner in reality, would take anywhere from 15-16 pulls of a trigger to burn off a standard 100 round belt of 7.62mm MG ammo.
The process by which gunners fire their MGs is methodical. To wit, the gunner checks his field of fire, traverses, checks elevation, acquires a target through the sights, fires a bust of six rounds, checks the impact of rounds, re-checks field of fire, traverses, re-checks elevation, re-aquires target, fires another burst of six rounds, than repeats the process again.
Also, on an M-60 at least, after firing around two belts of ammo (200 rounds), you’ll usually have to perform a barrel change assisted by your AG (assistant gunner).
Rates of fire, as quoted by the manufacturers are purely theoretical. In reality, the ability to maintain a certain rate of fire depends not only the specs and cyclic rate of the given automatic weapon, but also on the skill and experience of the machine gun crew that is operating the weapon.
Consistent cyclic rates of fire, therefore, are affected by factors such as operating conditions and the skill and experience of the crews.
Doc Nickel’s contention regarding the switching of barrels is NOT a ridiculous nitpick and is an accurate assessment of the time that an inexperienced M-60 machine gun* crew would take to change out an MG barrel on an M-60. (Experienced M-60 gpmg crews can switch a barrel within 15-20 seconds depending on conditions such as temperature, terrain, weather, etc.)
Spiny Norman’s assessment assumes the MG3. However, this assessment does not apply to the M-60 (used by U.S. forces up to 1998), which takes longer to switch barrels than the MG3, as the M60 barrel has a cumbersome bipod permanently attached to it, while the MG3 does not.
The MG3’s design facilitates an easier switching of barrels, b/c the MG3’s bipod is attached to the lower receiver of the weapon rather than the removable barrel itself, which means the MG3’s replacement barrel is lighter and easier to handle when removing it.
The 10-15 second time span for switching barrels quoted by Spiny Norman is an accurate description for MG3 operators (the MG3 is used by the Bundeswehr and othe European Armies). However, only a highly experienced M-60 crew could pull off such quick change out on an M-60 gpmg, and only in optimal conditions.
