D-Day

How and why was Omaha beach so bloody compared to all the other beaches? This or these battles hosts were Germany or also known as the Nazis versus the Allied forces: Britain and America at the Beaches of Normandy (Dear and Foot, 848).I f the Allied forces lost failed at these battles it would have led to a Nazi controlled France (Jenneys,26). There five beaches fought on in Normandy France along the English Channel: Juno, Utah, Omaha, Sword, and Gold (William, 43). And it so happens to be that the smallest of those five beaches the smallest of them, Omaha, happens to be the bloodiest. So this paper is going to look closer behind the scenes to see why Omaha was the bloodier battle of the five.

The operation behind this was this was operation overlord and what do ya know this operation had the most casualties over all the other operations too. The operation and all the other things associated with it are operation NEPTUNE (Dear and Foot, 848). The British operation was Roundup and it was there to let troops go to France (Jennys, 26). It was June 6th 1944 and the US is moving four thousand ships, one hundred six thousand troops, two thousand heavy bombers, seven thousand fighters, and ten thousand pounds of explosives. The United States had two troop divisions and Britain had only one. The ♦♦♦♦♦ General at the time was Gen. Dwight Eisenhower (Dupey, 1106) . The rare 5 star general had control of everything even the allied British!

The beaches had about three hundred yards of sand and then about fifty foot cliffs all along the beach proved another disadvantage for the United States because it is a utterly perfect place to put machine guns, heavy artillery, and also infantry. There were traps set every where there was under water barbed wire, mines, poles that had movement rigged bombs on the end, and much more (Vogt, 43). The weather conditions were just right for the week of the D-day attack Eisenhower’s climatologist Group Captain J. M. Stagg made this weather forecast on May second Nineteen forty-four (Jennys, 26). One of the idiosyncrasies is that the defending Germans were made up only out of conscripts and greens (Vogt, 44). Now that we have thoroughly describer the battle let’s get started talking about how D-day on Omaha beach was worse that any other battle that day. In the middle of the night around midnight the attacks began (Bbc.co.uk) airplanes started flying over and started dropping paratroopers. When they started dropping them they missed wildly and that was a good thing because it confused the Germans (Vogt, 46). When the troops started landing on there transports which some of them did not even make it on to dry land because either they were shot before they got there or there landing vessel did not make it to the place where it is safe to drop off the troops because of all the German artillery that was being firing at them. When they got past all of the traps of shore and water and they were on top of the cliff they would have these maze- like or checkerboard-like hedges that would make them get on the ground and crawl under them (Dupey, 1106). These guys needed some help so the navy started there attacks from water at around five hundred forty five or 5:45 am after about five hours of constant fighting. The British alone had five thousand ships but. unfortunately both the naval and airborne attacks, which were supposed to wipe out both artillery and the give men cover all completely missed there target and have no useful results. But the naval attacks were a bit more accurate than airborne but still did not weaken the Germans at all. The bad weather was the cause for all this bad luck. Blame it on group commander J.M. Stagg for the lousy weather forecasts (Jennys, 29). Another bombing was fulfilled but it didn’t go so well because the British were afraid of hitting there own positions (Vogt, 46).The battle wasn’t going so well for the allied forces. The boats that the men were on were being sunk and on average about 30 people died on each boat (Vogt, 46-48).