If* Saving Private Ryan* is any indication, it seems like all those big metal obstacle “hedgehogs” on the beach did on D-Day was give the Allied troops places to hide for cover from German machine-gun fire. Were they worth it to the Germans?
Well, they were there to rip open the bottom of the landing craft if the allies tried to land at high tide.
Since they landed at low tide, they avoided the hedgehogs, but had to cover a much wider expanse of beach under machine gun fire, instead. So, really, the hedgehogs worked as well as they could have.
Oh, OK. I had thought the hedgehogs were there to impede Allied tanks or vehicles that tried to drive on the beach.
They slowed things down making them stay in the zone covered by pre-sighted weapons longer.
But the Allied troops stayed longer because the hedgehogs gave protective cover.
If there had been no hedgehogs, it would have been “run like mad towards the Germans or die.”
The purpose of obstacles is not to make “go” terrain “no-go” terrain. That takes too many resources. Obstacles are placed to take “go” areas down to “slow-go.” Obstacles are then covered with fire to destroy the enemy.
Generally, it is better to reinforce slow-go areas with obstacles than to try to monkey with the high-speed avenues of approach at all.
Not Hedgehogs, which are animals.
Whoops.
Of course I knew hedgehogs were animals, I just thought the obstacles had been nicknamed that as well.
No, Velocity had it right. The metal obstacles deployed on the beaches at Normandy were Czech Hedgehogs. Once the Allied forces moved inland, they were impeded by hedgerows along the roads and fields.
Damn. I knew about the Allied pigeons, the Pacific war dogs, and the WWI trench cats, and I thought I was going to find out something fascinating about German hedgehogs. The reality, I have to say, is disappointing.
How 'bout the Mexican free-tailed bats?
Okay, that is literally bat-shit crazy. Thanks for the link - never heard that one before.
Then there’s Corporal Wojtek, the Polish War-Bear.
If you had been a German soldier shooting from the bunkers defending the beach, would you have preferred to deal with infantry that could hide behind the hedgehogs or with armored vehicles? Allied armor could have been used as mobile cover for infantry as it is today. Impeding movement of land/sea-based vehicles over the beach was more important than giving iffy cover to infantry, especially if it caused infantry to bunch up around them where they could be attacked with fragmentation shells.
The Allies then used the metal from the hedgehogs to create rhinos to defeat the hedgerows. So it’s all connected!
Here’s another war-like hedgehog- the British Hedgehog anti-submarine projector.
See here:
From here:
“The breakdown of US casualties was 1,465 dead, 3,184 wounded, 1,928 missing and 26 captured. Of the total US figure, 2,499 casualties were from the US airborne troops (238 of them being deaths). The casualties at Utah Beach were relatively light: 197, including 60 missing. However, the US 1st and 29th Divisions together suffered around 2,000 casualties at Omaha Beach.”
Given that a lot of the Omaha Beach casualties were due to being tied down at the base of the seawall, one can conclude that the hedgehogs, barbed wire, etc. on the actual beach might have caused around 300-500 casualties on US beaches. (The British-Canadian beaches were similar to Utah in difficulties.)
So all the hardware in the water killed a few hundred Allied soldiers. I think if you ran the numbers, putting all that money into tanks instead would have paid off for the Germans better. And that’s just in the Normandy area. Take all the money spent on all the beach hardware and spending it on mobile armor and such would have made things quite different.
I was wondering how the hell the Germans even managed to invade Poland–the Poles had a War-Bear!!!–but I see from that link that Wojtek was born in 1942 (and was just a cub when he first joined the Polish Army)–so he joined the fight too late to have stopped the German invasion in its tracks in '39.
“Mein Fuehrer! They have a BEAR! They have a WAR-BEAR!”
“RUN! RUN!!! AIEEE!!!”
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Bat Fact #342:
A war was partially fought over bat and bird shit, though there were certainly other causes. Guano contains nitrogen and other components crucial in the manufacture of explosives and fertilizer.
Note that half the “missing” were dead:
From the ame place (page 8) “6603 Americans … verified 2499 American D-Day fatalities”