Lots of articles are appearing in the media about D-Day, for example from the Guardian:
What’s the current consensus? Was D-Day done about as well as could be expected–or did they make lots of avoidable mistakes? [My knowledge of D-Day is mostly from the movies.]
Gonna totally ignore your question here to tell an almost unrelated story…
In a past life I was a hospice caregiver. Twice I had clients that were D-Day veterans. The first had both a Bronze Star and a Silver Star hanging on his wall. He of course never talked about it (I learned early in my career never to bring up my client’s military service) and his daughter would only say that he got them for “stuff he did on D-Day.”
Another client had two bullet wound scars on his back. His wife told me that the Germans would have a machine gun nest at the edge of a field or similar open space. The machine gun was basically there to get Allied troops to hit the ground. Next to the machine gun operator were several snipers who would then try to shoot the now prone (and slowly moving) soldiers. My client had been hit once by a round from a machine gun burst and then by a sniper.
There were several other WWII vets I had as clients but those two stick out in particular. I’ve always wondered what the first client did to earn the Silver and Bronze stars. I have no idea if there’s any way to find out now.
As a student of U.S. History I can can say with some confidence that D-Day was executed extremely well. It was (I think) the largest amphibious invasion force in world history. The amount of deception it took to pull it off successfully was astronomical and the Allies succeeded. There were a lot of unknowns that the Allies couldn’t control and had to trust luck to get them through (the weather being a big one). As brutal as it was it was an overwhelmingly successful plan and obviously turned the tide of World War II.
For a helluva good fictional account about one small aspect of the lead-up to D-Day read Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett. Ita fictional but incorporates many real-life events and people.
My uncle was not there on June 6 but he was there within a day and a half afterwards. He was part of a tank unit, I do not know how the vehicle got there. As Lancia said, he never spoke of it. As a kid I never thought about my male relatives being in combat, and by the time I learned of it he had dementia and could not talk of it. I have seen a picture of a small monument at Ft, Benning, GA, set up to the memory of the unit he was a part of.
One of the biggest problems was the US Navy ships staying too far off shore. Much further out than the plan had specified. So lots of problems with that. It made the shore bombardment even lousier than it would have been. The LCAs (Landing Crafts Assault) had a further distance to go to reach shore. This meant more time under fire, being affected by currents more so and got off course, etc. Then the followup suppressive fire was with few exceptions worse.
All quite shameful.
Most of the other problems were just the usual stuff going wrong between the planning tables and reality. Paratroopers were going to land all over the place. The LCAs weren’t going to get into shallow enough water to reduce drownings. Etc.
Can’t remember who said it, but “in a battle, the first casualty is usually your plan”. The invasion didn’t go perfectly, but nothing ever does.
I do know who said this -
It was General Eisenhower, in a statement he wrote before the invasion, in case it failed.
“Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan”. Eisenhower didn’t have any orphans. He was a leader, and a very brave man.
God’s peace to all those who died on this day in the cause of freedom.
Regards,
Shodan
Paraphrased by Mike Tyson as “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” 
The Bletchley Park twitter account is tweeting out Naval Enigma decrypts from D-Day in real-time. Pretty interesting stuff.
The success of D-Day was ensured by Operation Fortitude, the Allied disinformation campaign that convinced the Axis that there was going to be a 3 pronged attack, via Norway and Pas de Calais. As horribly difficult as the Normandy invasion was, it might have been impossible if the 13 German divisions assigned to the coast of Norway and Rommel and his tanks who were up in Calais had been there.
I have often wondered if the D-Day planners consulted with the US Marine Corps prior to the planning. After all, the Marines’ primary business was amphibious assaults, and they’d been at it for a couple of years by the time D-Day rolled around, learning lessons that might have been useful in Normandy. Amtracs in particular might have made a huge difference at Omaha Beach.
No it wasn’t. The Navy ships were where they were for perfectly good reasons.
Of course they did.
Many thing went wrong on D-Day, more things than we could recount here. A thousand things - operational, tactical, and logistical - went badly wrong. Just the other day I read an account about how Canadian paratroopers found, to their dismay, that went their chutes opened, one of the kit bags of a new design would tear apart and sprinkle their stuff all over France. All kinds of shit like that happened.
And yet Operation Neptune was probably the most brilliantly, ingeniously planned military operation of all time.
The complexity of the operation is simply not possible for a single human to grasp. Eisenhower himself didn’t understand all of it. It was indescribably complicated, ridiculously complicated. Entire technologies, innovations, vehicles, techniques, whole divisions of troops were created for this one operation. The operation involved more uniformed fighting men than currently work for General Electric. It took as much innovation and intelligence as a group of humans could possibly muster just to work as well as it did.
I don’t believe this is accurate: cite
The plan hardly matters. It is the planning that is important. To paraphrase Eisenhower.
I have never seen any indication of this.
The assault was planned for low tide. This sounds bad since it meant the ships couldn’t come in closer and the men had to go further under fire from the ship to shore. But it is actually a good thing since it meant that as the initial battle progressed, the tide would come in allowing the ships to approach closer and making it easier to support those on shore. If they’d started at the “best” time at high tide, then as soon as the battle started, the landing conditions would immediately start getting worse.
I don’t know if I buy the complexity angle; the actual landing tactics weren’t that complicated really. And the losses at Utah Beach were fairly light- on par with the British and Canadian experience. Omaha Beach is where things went sideways, pear-shaped and tits-up all at the same time, and the casualties show that.
The real complexity behind the operation was more centered around the fact that it wasn’t invading a little Pacific island or merely occupying a small area of coastline. This was a huge opposed invasion of an entire continent- that’s what all the logistical and organizational complexity came from, not the actual battle tactics involved with getting the assault troops onto the beaches. That’s where I’m wondering if they actually consulted the USMC very much- a lot of the issues that happened at Omaha Beach were similar in nature to what the USMC suffered at Tarawa- few tanks, leaderless men and intense opposition. In particular, the fact that the amtracs were the only vehicles that could reliably navigate both sea and land. After Tarawa, the USMC came to rely on them, and in fact, the Army did learn some kind of lesson, in that there were multiple battalions of Army amtracs slated for the invasion of Japan. Whether that was in response to D-Day, or just going along with what the Marines were already doing in the Pacific, I don’t know.
But I do wonder if a reasonable number of Amtracs at Omaha Beach might have made a material difference in the first couple of waves.
It’s my impression (and only my impression) that the shore artillery faced by the Marines in the Pacific typically wasn’t as heavy as that deployed by the Germans. I don’t know what an 88 or two would do to an amtrac full of personnel, but I don’t imagine it would be pretty.