Also, the use of effective defensive doctrine by the Germans. The allies knowingly waded into the teeth of properly sited and manned positions that gave the defenders the huge advantage, as demonstrated by Severloh’s performance. It also highlights the failures of the allied pre-landing aerial bombardment and subsequent naval gunfire. A hit from a single light naval gun early on would have changed the story completely.
This incident would be repeated on a smaller scale throughout the rest of the European campaign. German positions, properly set up and operated, would wreak havoc on US soldiers until overwhelmed by alllied numbers. Some of our notable successes were those occassions when we finally began to avoid such huge losses. In the bocage, the 29th and 83rd infantry and the 3rd armored divisions took major losses per mile of advance until they finally developed effective breakout tactics. But not everyone learned the lesson as the Germans were able to again punish us severly later on in the Huertgen forest.
I’m not exactly calling bullshit here, but you’d think that if one particular machine gun position was wreaking havoc on the landing forces, they’d get some combat engineers up on it and take it out pretty fast. They certainly would not let it continue on for 9 hours and let the soldiers within retreat when they ran out of ammunition.
Typically the way these things work is that the positions are mutually supporting with overlapping fields of fire; if the infantry tries to get up close with a flamethrower or a satchel charge, the other positions nearby can shoot them, even if the position under attack can’t.
So it seems a little strange to me that one guy would be the primary killer; I’d have expected the casualties to be spread out among all the positions in the area.
IIRC, the only reason that his location was identified was that he ended up using all his regular ammo and started up with tracer, until his barrel finally overcooked.
It can be extremely difficult to identify the source of enemy fire, escpecially small arams and especially at ranges exceeding 400 metres. This is not continuous fire, its in bursts of 4-6 rounds, alongside that there is plenty of other noise going on, and just how do you locate sound or bullet tracks when you are wading through rolling and breaking waves.
This soldier may have been a decent man, but he was serving one of the worst causes in history. Perhaps he had absolutely no knowledge of the horrors he was helping defend. If he did have some knowledge of what he was really fighting for, though, then I don’t think he was a decent man. Perhaps he became one later in life. There were “brave, dutiful” SS officers and concentration-camp operators too. Those were not decent men.
The world would be a better place today, and America would be a stronger, better country, if those thousands of soldiers who were machine-gunned had survived the war.
Yes, tracer is, was and always will be included in machine gun belts to help the gunner aim. Did someone somewhere pull out the traces for some reason? Sure. Was it generally done? Nope.
I’m very dubious about the claim that one man caused between half to two thirds of the casualties were caused by one man. Severloh’s position covered about half of the beach, the Easy Red and Fox Green sectors on these twomaps showing the assault. Bear in mind, while he had a very good field of view there would have been a lot of smoke over the battlefield. At Omaha, the assault troops were faced with artillery and mortar fire, interlocking fields of machine gun fire, small arms and mines. Many landing craft were swamped by the rough sea and sunk before they even reached the beach. Others were hit by artillery and mines. Most that made it through got stuck on sandbars 50 to 100 yards from the waterline. The whole beachhead was still under artillery fire at the end of the day. It was very grim indeed. I can’t find a cite that states how many machine guns the Germans had covering the beach, but the idea that a single gun could cause half the casualties in the midst of this carnage seems very unlikely. It sounds like a finger in the air estimate taken from the number of rounds fired. I doubt it’s even possible to make a proper estimate. If he was firing an MG42 all day he caused a lot of casualties, possibly hundreds.
All of this is beside the point really, as it’s incidental to the OP. No, we should not salute Heinrich Severloh, nor should he draw any special condemnation compared to your average German infantryman. Duty is only a virtue when it’s in the service of something worthwhile. It can have terrible consequences, and be used as a justification for almost anything. Nor should we salute his humanity especially, his pangs of conscience do not make him any more of a humanist than the numerous people who go through life without killing anyone. Incidentaly, I don’t pretend for an instant I know what I’d have done in his place.
There are some amazing personal tales from WWII, but we should never fetichise them. We should always the consider the context, and ask “for what end?”.
