Extremely small number of French. There was one bataillon of commandos, IIRC.
Still, the French force dwarfed the number of Australians who landed which, according to that same Wiki page, was 8.
I know about Tarawa.
“Who led the bloody slaughter in Tarawa
In Tarawa, in Tarawa
Who led the bloody slaughter
While McArthur walked on water?
The United States Marines!”
(Oscar Brand, “The United States Marines”)
And Filipinos paid in Filipinas.
That, and Hitler’s refusal to release the Panzer reserve until way too late - that too largely due to Fortitude.
I just had a thought. The Germans were by this time used to attacks from ridiculously huge numbers of Russians, dozens of divisions at a time. Perhaps they simply couldn’t believe that all the Allies could manage on D-day were 5 land and 3 para divisions as their main effort? It had to be a diversion?
One thing I’ve gotten from my time on the Internet (and I mean no offense to Western Europeans by this) is that it seems that people from Western European countries don’t really grasp how big the USA is (and, in the context of this discussion, how big the USSR was). Seriously, most Western European countries are similar in size to a single US state. I think Germany honestly didn’t comprehend how many men the US and the USSR had to throw at them.
Plenty of people know about Tarawa, but certainly not because of some 1950s era war movie with John Wayne, Gregory Peck or William Holden, like they do a lot of other WWII situations.
What? Because they can’t count population numbers?
And the size if a US state is meaningless if its just full of cows.
Anecdotally, our German exchange student in the 1980s was amazed at how long we could drive and still be in the same state. He said, “in Europe we’d have gone through more than one country by now!” He was even further amazed that we could drive across a state border without some sort of checkpoint or any documentation.
I think his point is not that they can’t count or estimate, but that they didn’t fully internalize the knowledge, or were engaging in some denial.
What if they’re stampeding? Nazi Germany has no chance against a few million panicked Longhorns! Let the C-Day invasion begin!
This is silly. Hitler knew very well what US entry into the war in Europe could mean. What he underestimated was the number of Americans who were politically motivated to intervene.
The way some Europeans don’t grasp the size of the US was summed up with an English couple I encountered some years back.
They were in Philadelphia, enjoying the museums, and they quipped that they had made reservations for dinner that evening.
In Niagra Falls.
S’what I get for posting when I’m drinking. The idea going through my brain when I was posting had to do with Germany underestimating our (and the USSR’s) ability and willingness to keep throwing men at them until the Nazis were beaten. It didn’t make it all the way to my fingers.
A recent episode of Perfect Storms on the Hitler Channel (though what the German invasion of Russia has to do with a meteorological storm I’ll never know, but it is the Hitler Channel, after all, so who can argue) says the German force in Russia included 600,000 horses. I’m skeptical, but maybe Cracked would agree.
A few million stampeding Longhorns would have made all the difference.
It’s true. It’s easy to get the impression that WW2 was a highly mechanized war, but it wasn’t. Only ~15% or so of German divisions during the war were panzer, panzer grenadier or motorized, the rest were infantry. The infantry had to march everywhere it went (outside of movement by railroad), supply was almost entirely moved by horse, and the artillery was horse drawn. From wiki:
The US and UK were able to entirely motorize supply outside of a few cases were donkeys were preferred due to their ability to go places vehicles couldn’t, but most divisions were infantry who again had to hoof it wherever they went. The difference compared to Germany was that their supplies were moved by trucks, as was the artillery.
Wow. I knew that Germany used horses, but I had no idea they numbered more than a million. In Russia, most must have ended up as the main course.
That’s kinda the opposite of my point. Given the men the US had available, (comparable to the USSR), the Germans may have expected an invasion of 10 or 20 divisions, not the 5 that arrived. Leading to the assumption that this must have been a feint, not the real thing, leading to them holding back the panzers to deal with the real invasion that was surely coming at the Pas de Calais.
That is, the Germans may have over-estimated the men the US had available for this purpose, not under-estimated. I just wondered if anyone had any knowledge of the German’s expectations of the invasion size.
There are a number of restrictions that apply to amphibious landings, though. For instance, the Allies couldn’t really land their armored divisions until they took a deep water port.
Eh? The Allied landed numerous armoured units over the beaches, including on D-Day itself. They didn’t get a functional deep water port until I think Cherbourg, weeks after the landing when it was way behind the front lines anyway.
Regardless, my question was not “what stopped the Allies from landing more units on D-Day?”. It is “Did the fact that the Germans were used to facing attacks of dozens of a divisions at a time on the Eastern front contribute to their assumption that the Normandy landings of 5 divisions was a feint?”.
There was no way the Allies could land more than 5 divisions on the first day; If the Soviets had had to cross a water obstacle the size of the English Channel, they couldn’t have managed a larger beachhead. It would have been physically impossible. The Germans knew this, and they also knew that the whole purpose of the initial landing was to secure a port so that they could bring in the lion’s share of the Allied forces and start the *actual *invasion.
Normandy was the largest amphibious landing in history, by several orders of magnitude. The Germans could not have mistaken it for a feint.
Or, y’know, China, aka Japan’s Russia.