It seems that the really good fortifications aren’t worth the trouble to tear down. The really lousy ones probably got blown to bits. You can find old abandoned Army forts in Hawaii and the Philippines. I know at least one of the Hawaiian ones got turned into a museum, a lot of the ones in the Philippines had been occupied by the Japanese after the US forces surrendered in 1942, then when the US returned in 45, the most expedient method of dealing with them was to cripple the gun turrets, then clamber up on top of the forts and pour diesel fuel down the ventilation shafts.
You can guess what happened after that. As far as I know, the forts have been abandoned ever since.
EDIT: IIRC, many of the old French fortifications along the Maginot Line also survived the war, and now serve as wine cellars and the like. No point in trying to tear them up, so just use them for something else.
For me a wild card as big as the hypothetical of what the Germans would have done had they been aware of the impending June 6th invasion at Normandy is Adolf Hitler. This isn’t a case where the invasion would occur (necessarily, though one can’t rule it out) but whether there would have been conferences, what we now call brainstorming and the like. It was up to Hitler what to do or not do with that particular piece of information which, as others have already suggested, he might have simply refused to believe, viewed as yet another devilishly clever Allied ruse.
All speculation as to what the German might or might not have done with a week’s warning of the Allied invasion at Normandy strikes me as possibly (with all due respect to many brilliant postings here) not nearly so important as Hitler’s state of mind in the spring of 1944. I think we’d get a better chance of understanding the likelihood of what Hitler might have done from notes of those close to him at that time. Nazi Germany was a one man band. So much depended on the whims of its leader, a moody and unpredictable fellow to say the least.
I don’t think D-Day in this and most other respects can be discussed as if it were Pearl Harbor (just a f’ristance) had we known of the Japanese attack of December 1, 1941. Things would have gone entirely differently. There would have been no aircraft carriers within a hundred miles of Honolulu; and the Japanese air corps would be been obliterated along with most of its fleet before they even reached Hawaii. But we’re a rational nation and we had rational leaders who consulted continually with a rational cabinet, congress, etc.
We KNOW pretty much what we’d have done with a week’s warning prior to December 7th, 1941, but we CAN’T know what Germany would have done within a week of D-Day. Yes, I know the situations were very different: one is a matter of how to take out Germany as the world war was drawing to a close in Europe, while the other is how we were going to be drawn into the larger world war three years earlier, but I don’t think it’s all apples and oranges. More like a tale of two nations. The “predictableness”, the rationality of America and the Allied nations versus the extreme “unpredictableness” of just one of the Axis powers speaks volumes all by itself.
Interesting thing as well is that only 14 days after D-Day, Hitler had to deal with an almost-successful assassination attempt and coup de etat. Must have kept the bigwigs in Berlin busy.
If it becomes clear,whether from ULTRA decrypts or observing troop movements, that the German reserve is on the move, and they have decided, there’s nothing to lose in concentrating air attacks on the transportation system leading into the Calvados départment.
The ULTRA decrypts were pretty much useless in this situation. German code communications in mainland Europe were handled over secure telephone lines which the Allies couldn’t intercept. They could only get messages that the Germans sent via radio or international telegraph lines.
As for aerial reconnaissance, it’s never as clear as military intelligence wishes. You fly a plane over a field and snap pictures in hopes that you might glean some useful and accurate information from them later. But it’s a pretty hit-or-miss procedure. The Allies, for example, didn’t realize the German 352nd Infantry Division was stationed at the coast. They thought it was stationed twenty miles inland and was being held as a reserve unit. And that was a mistake made after months of intelligence gathering on that particular spot. So it’s easy to imagine that if the Germans had brought in more troops in the days before the invasion, the Allies might not have realized it.
Yup, although part of the tunnels and some forts are specifically kept “as was”, as a museum. Also in case the dastardly Hun come back. This time,* this time* for sure it will work* !
yes, I’m aware it actually worked just fine and did exactly what it was supposed to. I never let facts get in the way of a cheap joke.
It’s a hijack, so if you want to talk about it, let’s take it to another thread, but I do not agree with this. We could have made PH more expensive to the Japanese, but we could not have stopped PH. Our equipment was, for the most part, nearly obsolete and our crews were not up to the early-war standards of Japanese naval aviation. Witness the next few battles. It wasn’t until our R&D and production advantage came into play that we starting winning reliably in the Pacific.
Panzer Lehr still wasn’t going to make it to the beaches on June 6th even if it had been given the order to move 12 hours sooner; at most it would have been in action on the 7th instead of the 8th. It also wasn’t really fully mechanized; panzer divisions had two panzer grenadier regiments each of two battalions. In most divisions one regiment had one battalion in halftracks and the other motorized in trucks and the other regiment had both battalions motorized in trucks. Panzer Lehr (and oddly enough, 21st Panzer) had both regiments with one battalion in halftracks and the other motorized in trucks, so the infantry was 50% mechanized and 50% motorized rather than 25% mechanized and 75% motorized as was the case with most panzer divisions. There’s the German Kriegsstaerkenachweisungen, wartime organization tables, of the Panzer Division 1944 at the bottom of the page here with the notes:
21st Panzer Divisions’s Kriegsstaerkenachweisungen with some explanation of how to read it is here. Wittmann wasn’t actually part of Panzer Lehr, he was in Heavy SS-Panzer Battalion 101. It’s movement orders are pretty illustrative of the problems caused by Allied air power:
Come to think of it, wandering off a bit further on this topic before we swing back to D-Day, there are bits and pieces of the old Imperial Japanese war machine still left over collecting moss in Japan. There was an old munitions plant/depot outside of Tokyo that included lots of reinforced tunnels and concealed bunkers and the like which survived the war undetected.
It was used as a ammo depot for the UN forces in the early part of the Korean War, and was later turned into a golf course and camping ground for US military personnel. Lot of the old bunkers and tunnels still cut through hills and such around the place. Admittedly it looks like a lot of the abandoned facilities around the place appear to be post-war American construction (boxy tan buildings with faded western numbers painted on them).
I was making an analogy, not attempting a hijack. We were not prepared for war even as late as December, 1941, I agree, thus my response was hyperbolic and not well thought out vis a vis Japanese air and sea power. Japan did have the advantage of surprise, which maximized the damage they did, but let’s return to D-Day. We simply cannot know how Hitler would have reacted to the news of the impending Normandy invasion due to the nature of his personality, his whims, his moods. This is where the analogy holds. Could anyone have predicted Hitler’s invasion of Russia after the fall of France? No. It was a terrible miscalculation on his part. The man’s behavior, his reactions to events, could not be predicted. Even 20/20 hindsight is nearly impossible where Hitler is concerned.
Actually, not. While some of our equipment was obsolete, others was not. Likewise, our pilots were actually trained reasonably well, it was that they lacked experience in actual combat and intelligence on the capabilities of the Japanese planes.
The US started doing much better within several months of the war, including the Battle of Coral Sea and then the victory at Midway, all fought with the same planes the US had at PH.
But, as you said, that would be a separate thread.
No, the analogy doesn’t hold. Comparing PH to D-Days is apples to oranges.
People underestimate the difficulties of acting in the fog of war. If plans were known a week before D-Day, the local commanders would have had enough information and had time enough to think things through to where they very well could have knocked the Allies back into the sea.
That time.
But, as others have pointed out, there would be an E-Day and then an F-Day, all the way until something worked, and in the mean time, the Soviets are marching west.
The end was inevitable, but the question on how it gets there is interesting.
Not quite all the same planes. There were a few models that got mixed up in the fighting in December of 1941 that were effectively phased entirely out of front-line service by summer of 1942, such as the Boeing P-26 Peashooter, the Seversky P-35 (forbear to the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt), and the Curtiss P-36 Hawk, which was developed into the P-40 Warhawk which was being rolled out as the new frontline fighter. All three saw combat in the Philippines (along with the P-40s) and several P-36’s also took part in the fighting at Pearl Harbor.
Of course, the main reason they didn’t use the same planes at Midway was because the Navy didn’t use any of them, but as of December of 1941, they did have quite a few older planes that would be pulled from the front lines by around mid-1942 or sooner, such as the Grumman F3F (biplane predecessor to the F4F Wildcat), Curtiss SBC Helldiver (dive bomber, also a biplane), and several older monoplane fighters and bombers (Brewster Buffalo, Douglas Devastator, Vought Vindicator) that did manage to see combat at Midway before being withdrawn from combat service. Of the newer planes that were already in service in late 1941, improved versions were also getting sent to the front lines by mid 1942 (the carrier-based fighter squadrons had a newer model of Wildcat than the unit defending the island, with more guns installed and a couple of other features)
Generally speaking, FDR was a busy boy when it came to upgrading the US military kit just in case he wasn’t able to keep the country neutral.
It was about a month and a half later- July 20th, not June 20th.
At the time, the Allies were starting to break out of the Normandy beachhead- the British Operation Goodwood attack was pinning down German forces in anticipation of the US Operation Cobra breakout further west in a few days.
There was also the B-18 Bolo which saw action in Hawaii and the Philippines but were phased out of front-line combat if by ‘saw action’ and ‘phased out’ one means ‘were almost to a plane destroyed on the ground.’
Of course. I’m not contesting that the Allies had a bunch of obsolete aircraft, some of which were still used in the Battle of Midway. The Brewster F2A-3, only two years old, was overwhelmed by the Zero.
My point is that it was not R&D and production which allowed the US to start winning, but rather by adopting strategies and tactics which worked.
Specifically, I had in mind the Grumman F4F Wildcat fighter and the SBD Dauntless dive bomber, which were instrumental in the victory at Midway. Although the F4F was slower, less maneuverable and had less range than the A6M Zero, US pilots had developed tactics which allowed them to outfight the less armored Japanese planes.
No doubt! The destruction of Army Group Center was almost certainly a bigger concern than Cobra or Goodwood to the German high command. I only mentioned them in reference to what was going on in Normandy at the time.