D-Day plus 75

[C-Mag]

D-Day Timeline, to the minute
https://www.dday-overlord.com/en/d-day/timeline
How it started
00:10
– The first US pathfinders jump on the Cotentin to mark the parachute zones for the C-47 pilots who will arrive in the next few minutes.
00:11
– The German paratroopers of the 13th company of the Fallschirmjäger-Regiment 6 report the presence of enemy paratroopers.
00:16
– The first of the 3 British gliders lands less than 50 meters from the bridge of Bénouville, the Pegasus Bridge.
– Merville’s German battery is attacked by 5 Avro Lancasters bombers of the 7th Squadron of the Royal Air Force.

[C-Mag]

very good map of Operation Overlord


Full size
https://www.secondeguerre.net/images/ca ... entnor.png

[brewster]

Trinity. 16 Jul 1945

Obviously I think it's up there, but without the Cold War, it would be of far less importance. There might not even have been the rise of Nazis without Bolsheviks (and their Jewish avatars) as their foil.

Nope. That's one of the most important events for any species in this universe. Once you unlock nuclear power, you are simultaneously on your way to the stars and heading to extinction bottleneck numero uno.

Been 74 years and neither event seems imminent. We don't have nuclear spacecraft nor plans on the boards, and since the end of the cold war the real threat of massive nuclear exchange has been low. When we get the inevitable nuclear terrorist act, I guess that assumption will be challenged.

[Speaker to Animals]

Obviously I think it's up there, but without the Cold War, it would be of far less importance. There might not even have been the rise of Nazis without Bolsheviks (and their Jewish avatars) as their foil.

Nope. That's one of the most important events for any species in this universe. Once you unlock nuclear power, you are simultaneously on your way to the stars and heading to extinction bottleneck numero uno.

Been 74 years and neither event seems imminent. We don't have nuclear spacecraft nor plans on the boards, and since the end of the cold war the real threat of massive nuclear exchange has been low. When we get the inevitable nuclear terrorist act, I guess that assumption will be challenged.

We've had viable interstellar drives since the 1960s.

[Speaker to Animals]

We are all rocking our teams at the gym.

[C-Mag]

The ridge above the beach looks a helluva lot bigger from the sea than it does on a map.







Photo Archive
https://www.politico.com/gallery/2019/0 ... 82?slide=5

[C-Mag]

The case for the importance of the battle

A little-known fact is that America was continually shuttling landing craft, both for vehicles and personnel, back and forth from Europe to the Pacific. The availability of landing craft was almost always the key point in setting landing dates for both areas.

A German victory at Normandy would probably have destroyed stocks of American landing craft by two or three years production, maybe more. Not only could there not possibly been another landing even attempted in Europe for a very long time, Pacific operations would have been dramatically slowed. America was set to take the Philippines back from the Japanese beginning in October 1944. The invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, both in the first half of 1945, were to follow. Significant loss of landing craft at Normandy would have thrown that timetable badly off.

Allied failure on the French coast would have meant enormous American and British casualties. Both the 82d and 101st Airborne Divisions would have been entirely destroyed because they could not have been relieved, having dropped inland. All their soldiers would have been killed or captured. The loss of life that defeat on the beaches would have entailed would have degraded the Allies' capability to try again soon almost as much as the loss of landing craft.

The Soviets certainly would not have slacked their offensives had Normandy failed. If anything, they would have pressed all the harder, but would have pressed equally hard for a much larger share of American war production, insisting that they were making better use of it than we were. As they would have been the only dog in the fight, the demands would have been hard for Roosevelt to resist. Not only would all Germany have become communist, so would France, whose communist cells were very active and which would have benefitted greatly from having the Soviet army literally next door. Imagine the Iron Curtain falling at the English Channel. The Soviet bear would have easily swallowed countries like Denmark, The Netherlands and Belgium. Likewise, Greece's postwar communist insurgency would have succeeded. Italy might easily have turned communist also.

European Jews, of course, would have been wiped out. Israel would not exist today. The Soviet Union would have dominated the Middle East and there's no point in even trying to speculate on what the next decades would have held for the Arabs (or Persians, since the Russians had long cast a covetous eye on Iran's year-round warm-water ports).

Roosevelt, of course, would not have been reelected that fall. He certainly would have sacked Eisenhower and Eisenhower's boss, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall. (Eisenhower actually would certainly have tendered his resignation. Marshall had survived the post-Pearl Harbor headrolling, but could not have survived failure at Normandy.) There's no point speculating what Republican President Thomas E. Dewey would have done with the office, but it is fair to say he would not have pushed for the creation of the United Nations, which was mainly Roosevelt's brainchild (for good or ill, take your pick), nor would there have been any reason for Stalin to cooperate with its formation, anyway.

Britain's people were incredibly war weary by mid-1944. Success in Normandy emboldened them to see the war to its bitter, bloody end. They remembered all too well the defeat of Dunkirk, when the British army had been evacuated from the French coast at the war's beginning, leaving behind its dead, almost all its vehicles and most of its weapons. Failure at Normandy would have caused Prime Minister Churchill's unemployment faster than Roosevelt's.
https://senseofevents.blogspot.com/2008 ... d-day.html

[brewster]

We've had viable interstellar drives since the 1960s.

What, Orion? Helluva ride. How many bombs to get a ship up to even 1/10 C?

As for the importance of Overlord, of course it was huge. But what would it have taken to fail? It was done using the Allies not so secret weapon, overwhelming material production. The majority of the beaches were far easier than Omaha and once the beachhead was established, despite the ferocious resistance in the hedgerows, there was not much chance they would be forced off. We simply had too much material, air dominance and manpower to throw into the theater. Ike knew what he was doing. Overlord was not Marketgarden.

[Hastur]

Some incredible colorized D-day photos over here.

https://marinamaral.com/2019/06/d-day-in-color/

[Hastur]

The WW2 Podcast
Episode 92 - D-Day: Omaha



http://ww2podcast.libsyn.com/93-d-day-omaha

‘Before the war, Normandy’s Plage d’Or coast was best known for its sleepy villages and holiday destinations. Early in 1944, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel took one look at the gentle, sloping sands and announced ‘They will come here!’ He was referring to Omaha Beach ‒ the primary American D-Day landing site. The beach was subsequently transformed into three miles of lethal, bunker-protected arcs of fire, with chalets converted into concrete strongpoints, fringed by layers of barbed wire and mines. The Germans called it ‘the Devil's Garden’.’

In this episode I’m joined by Robert Kershaw military historian, battlefield guide and author of Fury of Battle: A D-Day landing as it happened. We discuss the American landings on D-Day at Omaha beach.