But I’m talking’ about Cap, Baby.
I think some second wave troubleshooting teams that could be deployed to problem areas could be very effective.
How many Captain America-type super-soldiers would it haven taken to have a sizable effect on D-Day?
Don’t make me throw this pineapple upside down cake at you.
Hey now. Let there be no more talk about anybody throwing any pineapple upside down cakes. Throw all the carrot cake you want, but leave the PUD out of this.
The comic tells us and shows us two different things.
From what they tell us, he’s just a human in peak physical form.
From what they show us, he’s probably capable of tossing a small car, dodging bullets, or outrunning a slow car.
One of the key military maneuvers is to break through an enemy’s line at his weakest point (cite: Sun Tzu). If sent in first, it’s likely that the Captain could have single-handedly disabled a good stretch of the beach at Normandy. I think he could accomplish that even without the vibranium shield (but probably you’d want to give him a big chunk of metal as a shield, instead). So really, you’re talking about the equivalent capabilities of a full platoon, with the maneuverability of an olympic gymnast and the speed of a motorcycle. He could probably take out any Nazi defensive position in a few minutes, all by himself.
Overall, I think that being able to pin-point a single location that you can for-certain overrun with minimal losses could greatly change the strategy of landing on the beaches. Rather than spreading every one out and hitting the entire length of the beach in a single go, you might instead send the Captain in to create a safe landing spot near one for one of the endings of the beach, then he and the rest of the troops would start moving towards the other end of the beach, clearing the way for more landings. So overall, the landing becomes more like a wedge, starting with a single point, then growing wider to equal the width of the cleared zone.
Not to say that this would be the most effective use for him, nor that the Allies would have done it. But conceivably, it would be an option.
Huh. I thought this was gonna be about Skald using Gay Deceiver to actually pull this off. Scoop up a bunch of Caps and drop them in some troop transports right before the balloon goes up.
I’m disappointed in you, Skald. Very disappointed.
Keep in mind, the average human in a comic book is significantly stronger, faster, and above all tougher than a real-world human. Cap being “peak human” means a lot more in 616 than it does over here.
They would have dropped them behind the lines along with the 82nd and the 101st and used them to take out Nazi command and control. It probably would have shortened the war in Europe by months. In the Pacific theater, I don’t know how much they would have done other than perhaps provide leadership for Marine raider forces.
Are we talking comic-book Cap or cinematic universe Cap, because the latter is clearly superhuman. There’s a bit in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. where Mike Peterson (at this stage enhanced by the “centipede” process, though not yet cybernetically made into Deathlok) used a excavator as a tackling dummy and casually pushes it at least fifty feet across a grassy field. It looked kind of like a Caterpillar CAT325, and those suckers weigh ~28 tons. He then asks someone (Coulson, I think) “Did I beat Captain America’s record?” Coulson: “Not even close.”
This is a strength level more than sufficient to flip over a Panzer II. I wouldn’t bother throwing thousands of Super-soldiers at Normandy to get shredded by machine-gun fire, artillery and land mines. I’d parachute them into occupied France before the invasion and just let them break stuff to their hearts’ content, either working their way toward the coast so the invasion force can land with little resistance or just head straight to Berlin, play it by ear, see how it goes.
Can’t breathe…laughing…
I suspect that it depends heavily on whether they are a foreground or background character.
Coulson’s an unrepentant Captain America fanboy. He might have been lying.
Is this true for Nazis as well? My understanding is that unnamed characters in comics are pretty flimsy, and unnamed Nazis in comics are lead magnets.
Then we can dig it!
The trouble I had with the movie Cap’s effectiveness is, we won the war for real without any super soldiers. So to use Cap in what is effectively the “real” world diminishes all the efforts of the average soldiers.
But then, it doesn’t appear that he changed the war’s outcome in any meaningful way (except for defeating the Hydra army, which didn’t exist in the real world, so that’s a wash.) At least Aldo Raine managed to actually kill Hitler and end the war! 
That’s the sort of logic that discourages people from sending in female soldiers to fight. If a man is 2X as capable, physically, then a man is better. But it’s not an either/or scenario. If you send both men and women, then you end up with the total additive force of the 2X men and the 1X women. Or, stated in units of woman power, it’s the difference between 3wp or 2wp. 3 is more than 2.
And in the case you present, one presumes that for every Cap America, there’s a Cap Nazi to equal him. So it still ends up coming down to strategy and logistics.
It depends. Does the superhero fighting Nazis have a code against killing? If he does, he’ll still be able to deliver what should, by any rights, be a fatal beatdown to any number of Nazi goons without actually killing any of them. If the hero doesn’t have any qualms about killing, all he has to do with wave a gun in their vague direction for them to explode into bloody chunks of raw meat.
If you had the timing to develop special equipment, and use the existing stuff differently they could be used much more effectively. Infantry have always been constrained my the amount they can carry and handle.
A bunch on front line guys wearing 1/4 in steel armor, backed by a line carrying .50 Cals with shitloads of ammo Other guys carrying 50 pound grenades they can accurately throw 100 yards would force the other guys to fortify they hell out of everything.
The original Captain America comics were produced during World War II, and were highly popular with the soldiers who were actively fighting the war. I don’t think they felt diminished by him.
Anyway, why wouldn’t the exact same argument apply to, say, cops, or EMTs, or any other real world profession whose job involves stopping crime or saving lives? Are firemen diminished when Superman extinguishes a burning building?
I was referring only to the movie. I should have made that clear.
I LIKE Cap. But I’m not a long-term reader. My exposure is only the films. I just got the impression in the movie that no one else in the entire war effort was necessary - Cap could do it all. I know that is a limitation of movies, but it did strike me as such while watching in real time, not later at the fridge.
Sure. But in the comics, it took Cap something like twenty pages from his first introduction as a character, to knocking the teeth right out of Adolph Hitler’s mouth.
That’s sort of a weird criticism, considering how much support he was shown having in the movie - Peggy Carter, Howard Stark, Bucky, the Howling Commandos. The dude was hardly out there by himself fighting evil. I thought the film did a pretty good job of making Cap a soldier, not just a superhero, by showing him working with a team of elite soldiers and support personnel.