Not a Miracle

It was due to this ruinous fire that frontal assault troops of the First World War and D-Day often took high casualties. As David soberly explains, “attackers invariably suffer much higher casualties than their opponents.” On the first day of the Somme, for example, the British lost 57,000 of a total of 120,000 troops, almost half of their attacking soldiers, to only 8,000 German casualties. As a result of this gaping disparity between gains and losses expected for frontal assaults in both conflicts, large numbers of troops were concentrated in a single area in order to boost the chances of a sufficient number getting through the enemy lines. Private Fraser described his First World War trench as “a jumble with soldiers” immediately preceding his attack. At Vimy Ridge, five divisions were employed over a 7,000-yard front, with 15,000 Canadian troops attacking in the first assault. On the first day of Overlord, five amphibious divisions were tasked with taking one landing zone each. This amounted to 75,215 British and Canadians and 57,500 Americans landing in the short space of a few hours. Plainly, the dense concentration of attackers in assault zones where high casualties were expected was an accepted fact of infantry attacks both in the First World War and on D-Day.

A comparative analysis of specific case scenarios can establish just how similar the statistics are for these two conflicts. The American assault at Omaha, the Allies’ most costly beach, may be compared to an expensive French attack during the First World War, at Verdun. Of course, the assault at Omaha lasted for only one day, whereas the attack at Verdun spanned approximately 130 days. However, tactics remained the same throughout the battle, and thus information from Verdun may be averaged to find mean statistics per day for the purposes of comparison. First of all, the five mile front at Verdun is comparable to Omaha’s beach length of almost four miles. Additionally, the Americans landed most of an entire division at Omaha on D-Day, and the French sent approximately 88 percent of a division into Verdun per day, on average. Finally, Omaha’s cost of 2,200 American casualties is very similar to Verdun’s average cost of 2,423 casualties per day. Of course, this comparison takes into account only the worst beach on D-Day, and makes use of information from only one battle on the Western Front. However, the striking similarity of the figures in these case scenarios – front length, size of attacking force, and casualties taken – is a valuable indicator of the parallels between frontal assault during the First World War and on the beaches of Normandy. At the very least, it is unarguable that both conflicts were extremely costly for the large attacking forces.