What a slide show of nonsense. The very next slide on is complaining about spelling on the Constitution. Sorry kiddies, but standardized spelling is a modern concept. Pennsylvania is spelled the same way on the Liberty Bell.
I hate smug amateur historians who have no sense of context.
Well sure. British, but not British British. 
But a lot of those Soviet losses were civilian and POW massacres by the Germans, who treated Soviet citizens as subhuman trash. Plus a lot of Soviet military losses were due to Soviet military tactics that treated soldier losses as almost irrelevant in the path to overall gains, incredibly poor Soviet military medicine, and the incredibly poor planning of Stalin before the war. The Soviets clearly tied down more German divisions than the Americans and British, but let’s not think their impact was 20 times bigger than the Western Allies.
It’s also perfectly natural to have such beliefs and it’s hardly unique.
Compare British and Germany history books accounts of Waterloo.
Hell, I can’t think of any of the Vietnam War movies other than, ironically enough, The Green Berets, which even acknowledged the existence of the ARVN(the South Vietnamese Army) even though the ARVN suffered nearly five times as many deaths as the US military.
Anyway, it’s also worth keeping in mind that the US took the brunt of the casualties on D-Day.
Bigger casualties doesn’t necessarily mean you’re fighting harder. It can also mean you’re not fighting as well.
This. If we started measuring wars by casualties incurred, war would be even uglier than it is now.
It’s not much of a point, as the campaign wore on the proportion of Allied forces that were American continued to grow as formations arrived from stateside. Conversely, before the Normandy campaign was over the British were forced to disband two infantry divisions (50th and 59th) to provide infantry replacements to keep the rest of the divisions in the field. Overall casualty figures for the Western Front were:
Indeed, far more casualties were suffered at Slapton Sands when German E-boats got amongst a training exercise for Utah beach than were suffered in the actual landing at Utah.
Keep in mind that those Photoplasty images are submitted by readers, not made up by the Cracked staff. The reader who submitted that particular entry most likely did not draw the map himself, he probably found it online and added the text to it. The Photoplasty feature is, after all, basically a Photoshopping contest.
That one German corporal killed as many as 1,500 Americans at Omaha with his mg-42, accounting for most killed at Omaha, or Normandy for that matter.
Cracked articles have their highs and lows, and some of the lows are pretty damned low, but the better ones are fairly good and they usually cite sources. On average, they’re not much worse than most SDMB posts, once you learn to subtract out what they put in simply for comedy.
Note, too, that Cracked articles have multiple authors, some of whom are regulars and some of whom only do one or two, and some authors are more interested in facts than others. And, of course, if you only read parts of the lists, you might only get the part where they set up the myth they spend the rest of the list entry tearing down; I’ve seen that happen on the SDMB, in fact.
Well, in this case, the slide in question came from a user-submitted list. But the quality variance still applies (although some include their cites so you can see for themselves).
Don’t forget the 3,000 Aussies, sorry we couldn’t send anymore we were a bit busy with Japanese at the time 
Slightly off-topic, I heartily recommend Keegan’s “Six Armies in Normandy”, which looks at the campaign through the perspective of each of the five Allied armies (British, Canadian, American, French and Polish), plus the Germans.
The best way I’ve had WWII explained on college was simple: Americans paid in cash, Brits paid in time, and the Soviets paid in blood.
I’m shocked at the transport of what seems to be a child’s bike.
It can also mean you drew Omaha.
I was reading a 1945 issue of Yank magazine (produced by and for enlisted men in the US Armed Forces) and one of the writers basically said “yeah, the Soviets really did the heavy lifting in this war in terms of fighting and casualties.”
Uh…if you’re referring to Operation Mincemeat, the “Man Who never Was” deception faking an invasion plan for Sardinia (and Greece, by the way), that was to cover the invasion of Sicily (and subsequently Italy itself), not France.
Operation Fortitude was the large-scale deception plan supporting Overlord, the invasion of France. Although it had many elements, the one that probably was the most important was Fortitude South, the fake invasion of the Pas de Calais, by Patton’s fake First US Army Group. German attention remained fixed on the Pas de Calais long after Overlord was ashore. As far as I know, Sardinia had nothing to do with Fortitude or Overlord.
Sorry to pick another nit here…I am a firm believer in not minimizing the Soviet contribution to the war…but I don’t know what you could be talking about here. I can’t imagine how OB West (German command in France) would have changed its operational dispositions based on anything happening on the Eastern Front, particularly after the Allied landing. Rundstedt and Rommel had their hands full locally.
And if you’re referring to Operation Bagration, the gigantic Soviet offensive that crushed Germany’s Army Group Centre…well, while that did create an immediate crisis for the German army, it didn’t start until June 22, sixteen days later.
What kept the Germans from reinforcing the Normandy front was, overwhelmingly, [Western] Allied airpower. American and British heavy bombers had concentrated on destroying rail transport and roadways throughout France in the weeks leading up to the invasion; and masses of fighter-bombers swept over the German rear areas, concentrating on preventing movement during daylight. Rommel, who had experienced Allied airpower in the desert, had predicted this, and asked to put all his mobile forces as far forward as possible; Rundtedt, unused to fighting without Luftwaffe superiority, wanted to hold the tanks well back and commit them to the point of invasion after landing. Hitler split the difference with an inadequate compromise. The result was, most German forces trying to move forward to the invasion point were interdicted and/or destroyed by roving fighter-bombers. One German commander talked about moving only a few miles and losing almost all his tanks in a single day due to constant aerial harassment.
I think this is the main thing; outside of Omaha Beach, Pointe du Hoc, and the scattered paratrooper adventures, the actual landings on Utah, Gold, Juno and Sword beaches were pretty lightly opposed.
On Omaha, things went sideways in a hurry and that’s what got made into movies and what people think about when they think “D-Day”.
Kind of like the way the movies would have someone believe that the war in the Pacific went like this: Pearl Harbor, Doolittle Raid, Midway, Guadalcanal… then sometime in 1945, you’d have Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and then the atom bomb, with some submarines and PT Boats thrown in.
There’s very little mention of Saipan, Peleliu, Tarawa, Cape Gloucester, Burma, the Phillipines, the Aleutians, Coral Sea, Truk, Leyte Gulf/Samar etc…
(I can’t help but think that a Taffy 3 / Battle off Samar movie might be really interesting)