Not sure if I shoulda asked this in History or here but I've always wondered 2 things (while watching the invasion scene in Saving Private Ryan):

1. Why wasn't there air support in addition to the water invasion? Wouldn't this have dramatically cut down on casualties that day?

2. When our soldiers (or any) have the medic cross/label on them is there an unwritten rule across the world that they are not to be shot at?

Sorry if these questions seem too basic. I've always just wondered.

Tons of naval and air support. Some accurate, some not, some ineffective against reinforced positions. I doubt that any of it would have been accurate enough to help right down on the beach.

I'm going to guess that the medic is normally not targeted, but when thousands of rounds are going all directions, no one is safe.

Bombers had flown over the beaches and missed their targets due to poor decision mak
inge and navigational errors.

Invasion was during the night with parachute drops behind lines you have to bomb days prior to the invasion or your men are in the melee.

Air support on the beaches was not thought to be needed because German AF was taken out of the battle.You needed the element of surprise nad proximity to front lines made this impossible to do.

At the time medics were considered non-combatants, like clergy. They weren't allowed to carry weapons and wore the cross to signal they were off limits. Lots of stories of Germans using the cross as a target though. Medics now are armed

I was stationed in Germany when the run up to the 50 year anniversary happened. My unit was tasked with providing 2 officers and 4 NCO's to attend the pre-briefing on the celebration.

My direct supervisor (CPT) was tasked to go (I was an E4 but worked directly for him in an admin role). He asked me if I wanted to go (as a van driver) as I was a history guy like he is.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to go. I got tasked to the field instead. But I wish I could have done the walk through... He took lots of pics of the beach heads, the cliffs, the areas behind it. 3 days of pure history lessons lead by guys who were there. American, Canadian, French, Brits and Germans.

Missed out due to a stupid gunnery range detail!

Why didn't they lay down smoke screens

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1. Why wasn't there air support in addition to the water invasion? Wouldn't this have dramatically cut down on casualties that day?

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There was air support as well as bombing missions. The beaches of OMAHA and UTAH are very narrow, and the days of tactical bombing by high and mid level bombers had yet to be perfected. The invasion was to land at OMAHA at 0630 hours and naval and air bombardment would have to cease at that time as not to inflict casualties from friendly fire.

Reading books and listening to first hand accounts from both Army and Army Air Corps there is some disagreement to the effectiveness of the bombing. I've heard from DDAY soldiers that the beaches were untouched from the bombing, as they were prepared to use the craters for foxholes, while air corps pilots told me they were successful with their assignments of bombing the beach area.

Due to the shelling from naval guns grass fires did ignite along the ridges at OMAHA and did provide some cover for inbound troops.

If Allied Supreme Commanders had not been so concerned about surprise the best course of action would have been to bomb the hell outta the beaches for weeks prior to the invasion. We had air superiority and could have destroyed moral of the German troops sitting in their bunkers.

http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USMA/WEurope1/WEurope1-3.html

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If Allied Supreme Commanders had not been so concerned about surprise the best course of action would have been to bomb the hell outta the beaches for weeks prior to the invasion. We had air superiority and could have destroyed moral of the German troops sitting in their bunkers.

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ya, this is what i was getting at (in addition to a bombing of the high elevation points just as we were about to land). it just seemed so common sensical to do this i was puzzled as to why it wasn't done.

Goes back to the "element of surprise". Lots of D-Day histories talk about how Hitler held Panzer divisions at Calais for days because he was convinced Normandy was a feint. Intense bombing/shelling would have given it away.

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Goes back to the "element of surprise". Lots of D-Day histories talk about how Hitler held Panzer divisions at Calais for days because he was convinced Normandy was a feint. Intense bombing/shelling would have given it away.

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We would have destroyed the Panzers at Calais in month long bombings of the coast. Shoot we may have been able to land in Calais after the carpet bombing campaign, if it had been carried out.

People seem to forget the high number of civilians living in Calais and Normandy both. While some collateral damage was accepted, the idea of carpet bombing whole areas and the high number of civilian deaths (of a occupied Allied country) it would have caused was beyond the scope of what the Allies would have accepted.


[This message has been edited by Aggies Revenge (edited 2/9/2013 9:57a).]

Not to add that WWII bombing was horribly inaccurate.

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it would have caused was beyond the scope of what the Allies would have accepted

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Caen and Dresden were pretty much destroyed by allied bombing.

I drove from Calais to Vierville in 2004 and there weren't thay many villages/towns.

The Allies made bombing runs on the beaches, but due to low cloud cover, they missed the mark. In order to avoid the possibility of hitting Allied ships and troops, the bombers held their delivery for a few seconds. A few seconds is a lot of distance on a bomb run.

The area was bombed heavily in the weeks prior to D-Day, but Calais was bombed twice as much to throw the Germans off. The secrecy did work, the Germans held the reinforcements in the Calais area for a long time believing that Normandy was a diversion. Had the Germans responded with all of the troops in the area, they may have been able to stop the Allied invasion on the beaches and driven them back into the sea.

Several Navy destroyers disobeyed orders and moved close to shore to bring their 5" guns into direct fire support against German bunkers.

Another failure on the American beaches was trying to send the DD tanks over a mile in heavy seas. I believe that only 3 out of 36 made it to shore. The Canadians and British launched their tanks much closer to shore and had more success in landing armor.

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Another failure on the American beaches was trying to send the DD tanks over a mile in heavy seas.

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The failure was that Army tank officers didn't understand navy tactics. The tankers were instructed to use the church steeple at Vierville as a landmark, but as they got closer to shore the current, which runs right to left from sea, pushed the tanks off the mark. Instead of allowing the current to push them down current the tankers tried to turn broadside into the current to hit the mark. The canvas sides were swamped and the tanks sunk.

There was some cloud cover. The bombers did not release their bombs to hit the beach, but landed 2-3 miles in land. Not sure why dive bombers were not used more. There was ship fire support.

"It is better to trust in the LORD than to put confidence in man," Psalm 118:8.

Dive bombing wasn't used because this was an Army op. As far as I know no US carriers launched aircraft in support of Overlord. All air camd from AAC and RAF airstrips in England. As the AAC had no dive bombers, only tactical high and mid level bombers were used. The only dive bombers in US arsenal were the Dauntless and the Helldiver. Used mainly in the Pacific.

There was also a huge struggle by Eisenhower for control of strategic bombers for use in tactical bombing in support of the beaches.

Close air support did not exist as we know it today.

Both the Germans and the Japaneses targeted soldiers wearing the red cross. Only the Americans and the United Kingdom nations have a history of respecting the Red Cross designation. I was an ambulance platoon leader back in the late 70's. we were issued the Red Cross arm broussard and had red crosses on all our ambulances. I would not have allowed my soldiers to wear the arm broussards if we had gone to combat and I put a gallon of OD green paint in each ambulance's combat load to cover the red crosses if deployed.

A British double agent (who was actually a Spaniard) fooled the Germans into thinking Normandy was a diversion and Calais was the real invasion target.

An Enigma intercept of a German message proved to the Allies that the ruse had worked.

This link is a little long, but well worth the time to read it all the way through.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12266109

American close air support tactics and capabiities developed rapidly during the weeks and months following Overlord. In fact, the essential TT&Ps used in Korea, Vietnam, and that my squadrons employed in Iraq and Afghanistan, were developed after the invasion during the 1944-45 European Campaign. The genius of this effort was General Elwood "Pete" Quesada . . . without question one of our great WW2 battlefield leaders. Quesada commanded XIX TAC. Here is a short quote from Quesada's bio (wiki):

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During his time as a junior officer he became interested in the concept of close air support of ground forces, which was thoroughly developed by the 9th during his time as commander in North Africa and Europe.

Quesada was instrumental in developing many of the principles of tactical air-ground warfare for the Ninth Air Force during the European campaign. Innovations attributed to him included placing pilots as forward air controllers inside tanks equipped with VHF aircraft radios on the front lines. This latter technique allowed for direct ground communication with overhead fighter-bombers by personnel who understood what pilots needed to identify ground targets. Besides reducing friendly fire incidents, such tactics allowed attacking ground troops to use close air support with greater precision and speed, allowing for air cover to take the place of artillery support in a rapid armored advance. These improved tactics enormously expanded the contributions of tactical airpower to the Allied defeat of Germany on the Western Front.

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Rock is correct. There was plenty of air support used and plenty available but in that era it was severely limited by three factors that Qeusada's visionary tactics could not entirely overcome.

The first limitation was in the ability to make air support into true close air support (CAS). CAS requires a forward air controller in contact with the pilots dropping the ordnance to provide "terminal guidance" and avoid fratracide. There was barely any way for a pilot in WW II (or today) to distinguish between friendly and enemy skirmishing at the distances that they were fighting on Normandy. Geography was not that much of a help because if they attack was succeeding and a pilot dropped ordnance on a German pillbox that had just been seized by US forces then friendly CAS wasn't. The power and clarity of radios for ground to air communications and management of the radio spectrum in that era made it nearly impossible to carry a radio or to contact the section.

The second problem is that the only weapon of the era mounted on aircraft truly useful to troops on the ground in close contact with the enemy was wing mounted machine gun. Nothing else was precise enough to hit the target and even to do so required them to come in low and straight which made the aircraft and unacceptably stable target for enemy ground defenses. Six years later on the east side of Chosin Resevoir (great book on the battle by an Aggie named Roy Appleman) the Army's 31st RCT was cut off and surrounded by divisions of Chinese. Air support was decisive in preventing that unit from being totally annihilated but even then only 385 of ~3000 survived. Among those who did survive was a FAC who had to walk the napalm (no kidding, bad enough situation that napalm was used at less than 100 meters) of the Corsairs in so close that years later one of the pilots told him he thought that the FAC had died because he could see his helmet inside the 20 mil ring of his gunsite when he was releasing the napalm. Several US soldiers did get burned up because in that desperate situation napalm was the only effective weapon available and the alternative was being overrun an annihilated.


The lack of ability to bomb precisely did not see significant progress until the late part of the Vietnam War.


http://www.airforce-magazine.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2010/March%202010/0310bombs.aspx

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The quest for bombing accuracy was an old story for the Air Force. The spot where an unguided gravity bomb hits the ground is a function of the direction and speed of the airplane at the point of release, the aerodynamics of the projectile, and the wind and atmospheric conditions while the bomb is in flight. A bomb dropped half a second too late can miss its target by hundreds of feet.

During World War II, it was popular to claim that Air Force bombardiers, equipped with the fabled Norden bombsight, could hit a pickle barrel from high altitude. In actuality, the average accuracy for bombers in 1943 was 1,200 feet, as measured by the standard circular error probable, or CEP. Accuracy improved to about 1,000 feet by the end of the war as aircrews gained proficiency.

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Wait until you read why they landed at low tide rather than at high tide.

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Wait until you read why they landed at low tide rather than at high tide

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I stood on OMAHA beach on June 7th, 2004 at 8am. I walked to the edge of the water and was a good 100 yards from the first area of cover, known as the shingle. At 10am I took a picture of the beach from the platform close to the cemetery and the beach was completely covered with water. Lots of men died due to drowning that day.

My father was in the 505th PIR of the 82nd and jumped that evening. The 505th liberated the first French town, Ste Mere Eglise. I have an ancient letter from the mayor of Ste. Mere Eglise framed in my office that describes the actions of the 505th that day. I too went to Normandy in June 1994 for the fiftieth anniversary to honor those guys. Also have an uncle that was killed at St. Lo and visited his grave in the American cemetery on that visit. Once my youngest is 12, I'm going to take my boys over to visit the places where their grandfather fought and his buddies died. I also visited his combat locations for Operation Market Garden and The Bulge.

My dad was the S-1 of a combat engineering
battalion assigned to bridge building. He went ashore in d-day+3. He said the best part of the medium and long range bombers were assigned to rail and road interdiction to slow down the reinforcements.

The fighters were primarily used to stop the enemy fighters and bombers from shelling our troops, which was highly effective.

Mass bomber supports to smash thru enemy fortifications was not used until the Saint Lo and Falaise Pocket area.

When My Dad's unit was tasked to build the largest bridge built under enemy fire crossing the Rhine, the close air support kept all enemy aircraft from making more than a token pass by and served as his main artillery support as he had only two companies of infantry to support the two engineering companies that had crossed the Rhine.

The incentive to finish the bridge in record time was quite high as their was a Panzer Division only thirty miles away.



[This message has been edited by 69huslinone (edited 3/22/2013 2:13a).]

Question No.1. The European brass snubbed their noses at the hard lessons learned by the Seventh Amphibious Force in the Pacific. They disregarded the use of Amtrac vehicles and the lessons of pre-invasion bombardment theories, both aerial and seaborne. Normandie was not prepared in that sense and there was no close air support that was used extensively by the Army/Marines in the Pacific. The Amtrac and preparing the beaches would have cut the casualties significantly as the Amtrac would have gotten the assault troops across the long stretch of open beach that was so deadly.

No. 2 In WWII medics didnt carry weapons, they were often conscientious objectors and thus didn't want to carry them. Were they shot and killed? Yes. Intentionally? Who knows. Medics in Afghanistan do not wear anything that denotes them as such. They carry the same weaponry as the 11B

[This message has been edited by Rabid Cougar (edited 3/25/2013 8:33p).]

Where did you get that medics were concientious objectors? Even in 1940, concientious objectors were discharged.

Oh, and amphibious vehicles don't drive over caltrops. And heavy bombing would have made Hitler realize that Normandy was the real deal.

Desmond Doss, conscientious objector.



http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=528487830784

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But it was in the hell of Okinawa in 1945 where Cpl. Desmond Doss would perform the ridiculously-over-the-top act of desperate death-despising balls-outitude he would come to be remembered for in the annals of American military history. His unit, B Company of the 1st Battalion, 307th Infantry Regiment, 77th Infantry Division, had been ordered to take part in the massive operation to capture the Maeda Escarpment – a 400-foot-high ridge overlooking the entire south side of the island that was virtually packed solid with boulders, machine gun nests, booby traps, concrete pillboxes, and winding caves filled with angry gun-wielding Japanese people. Every step of the battle was hell, as the Japanese contested every square centimeter of the hill with their lives. Doss and B Company climbed ropes up sheer cliff faces, advanced through dangerously-wide-open minefields, and cleared out enemy positions with flamethrowers and satchel charges as the tenacious defenders hammered them with machine guns and mortars relentlessly day and night without mercy, vowing to die where they stood rather than concede a single handful of dirt to the American assault. It was during this fight, on the night of April 30th, 1945, Desmond Doss performed one of many feats of heroic bravery when a 5-man squad of B Company soldiers charged up a 40-foot cliff and were mowed down at extreme close range by a Japanese machine gun team: Doss, never one to leave a wounded man behind, got on his belly and army-crawled to his injured comrades – who, by the way, were less than 15 feet from the machine gun (!) – on four separate occasions, each time dragging a soldier to safety.

Just four days after this mind-blowing act of selfless heroism, Doss and 1st Battalion were on the move again, continuing their inexorable advance up the Maeda Escarpment. This time, however, the Japanese had a trap waiting for them – the moment the Americans moved into a dangerously-exposed position, two camouflaged trenches filled with Japanese troops threw off their camo netting and opened up with a deadly enfilading fire that raked the American patrol from two directions at once. 500 of the 800 men in 1st Battalion were killed or wounded in action, the rest broke and withdrew in panic, and when the smoke cleared only one American was left standing on the blood-soaked battlefield.

"We had a lot of wounded lying around, and I had my buddies there,
and I couldn't give up. I had a Japanese aid kit, two American aid kits,
and my pockets were stuffed with bandages. I couldn't just abandon my men.
They knew if there was any way possible I could take care of them, I would."

Desmond Doss, alone, aided only by covering fire from the surviving members of the battalion, ran back and forth through a Japanese killzone for FIVE HOURS STRAIGHT, pulling wounded soldiers out of the battlefield, dragging them over to the only means of escaping the death field – a 40-foot cliff at the edge of the Escarpment – and then lowering them down to safety using a juryrigged pulley system he tied himself out of ropes. As rifle fire whizzed over his head from both directions, Doss crawled through the crossfire, sometimes to within 30 feet of the Japanese front lines, grabbing the wounded Americans and pulling them back in a Herculean display of hardcore badassitude. The official record states that over the course of five hours of constant work, Doss pulled 75 wounded men out of the battlefield and hand-lowered them 40 feet off a cliff to waiting ambulances below. Doss, always humble, thinks the number is more like 50. The Army Medal of Honor citation initially read 100. I'd argue it doesn't really matter that much – it's not the number that counts, it's the fact that this guy ran through a brutal war-torn hellhole, completely unarmed, and dragged badly injured men to safety until he was physically unable to move his legs any more.

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David Bleak, though not officially identified as a conscientious objector also earned the Medal of Honor and his daughter has said that though he enlisted in the Army to see the world he did not want to carry a weapon and thought that being a medic offered the opportunity to service without killing. When it came down to it, David Bleak killed Chinese with his bare hands while rescuing wounded soldiers. He killed five Chinese and only resorted to using a weapon (knife) for one of them.

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As they attempted to continue up the hill, several Chinese soldiers from a nearby trench opened fire, injuring another soldier. According to witness reports, Bleak rushed the trench and dove into it, tackling one Chinese soldier and, with only his hands, broke the soldier's neck, killing him. Bleak was then confronted by a second soldier, whom he reportedly grabbed by the neck, fatally crushing his windpipe. A third Chinese soldier then approached, and in the ensuing scuffle, Bleak used his combat knife to stab and kill the soldier.

Bleak then returned to the patrol and attempted to treat more wounded members, but soon thereafter a Chinese hand grenade bounced off of the helmet of the soldier standing next to him and landed nearby. Bleak tackled the soldier over and covered him with his larger frame to protect him from the grenade, but neither was injured in the ensuing blast. The patrol then continued on its mission, and was successful in capturing several Chinese prisoners. However, as it descended Hill 499 to return to UN lines, they were ambushed by another group of Chinese hidden in a trench with an automatic weapon. Three of the other soldiers were wounded in the attack, and as Bleak attempted to run to them, he was hit in the leg. Bleak dressed all four wounds, but one of the men had been hit too critically to move. In spite of continued Chinese fire and his own injury, Bleak picked up the wounded soldier and began to carry him down the hill.

As he attempted to withdraw with the wounded soldier, Bleak was confronted by two more Chinese. Putting down the wounded soldier, Bleak reportedly surprised the Chinese soldiers by charging them and smashing their heads together with such force that he may have fractured the skulls of one or both of the assailants before pushing them out of his way. Eventually, all 20 men of the patrol returned to the UN lines, but a third of them were wounded. Bleak was credited with saving the patrol, both by promptly treating the wounded and by aggressively attacking and killing or neutralizing five Chinese soldiers.

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I agree that amtracs would not have been able to get around the caltrops and better than the DUKWs. Amtracs excel at crossing reefs which really weren't an issue at Normandy. Even if they had avoided the caltrops, the planners were probably reluctant to employ amtracs when they would not have been able to move quickly off the beach because of the cliffs. Arguably they would have saved some lives but I don't think that they would have been a transformative weapon system for the D-Day landings.

1=/=all

[This message has been edited by Tango Mike (edited 3/26/2013 9:13p).]

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Where did you get that medics were concientious objectors? Even in 1940, concientious objectors were discharged.

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Desmond Doss
David Bleak

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1=/=all

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No one said "all", the term was "many".

PBS Special

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For the first time in American history, World War II draftees who were deemed legal conscientious objectors had two choices: non-combatant service in the Armed Forces or alternative work in the Civilian Public Service. Twenty-five thousand World War II conscientious objectors served as non-combatant medical corpsmen and chaplains in the armed forces.

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And one more to the MOH list:

Thomas Bennett, Vietnam

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Born in Morgantown, West Virginia, Thomas W. Bennett was sociable and deeply religious. While a student at West Virginia University, he formed the Campus Ecumenical Council during his freshman year.

When he was placed on academic probation after the Fall 1967 semester, he considered his options should he lose his academic deferment. Deeply patriotic, but opposed to killing on religious grounds, he opted to enlist as a conscientious objector who was willing to serve. This classification is different from a conscientious objector who will not assist the military in any way. He was trained as a field medic.

Cpl. Thomas W. Bennett arrived in South Vietnam on January 1, 1969, and was assigned to Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 14th Infantry in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The unit began a series of strenuous patrols in the dense, mountainous terrain. On February 9, 1969, the unit came under intense fire, and Cpl. Bennett risked gunfire to pull at least five wounded men to safety. That evening, his platoon sergeant recommended him for the Silver Star.

Over the coming days, Cpl. Bennett repeatedly put himself in harm's way to tend to the wounded. On February 11, while attempting to reach a soldier wounded by sniper fire, Cpl. Bennett was gunned down. On April 7, 1970, his posthumous Medal of Honor was presented to his mother and stepfather by President Richard Nixon.

A dormitory tower at West Virginia University's Evansdale Residential Complex is named in his honor.

A medical clinic at Fort Hood is named in his honor.

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Joseph G. LaPointe, Jr.

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LaPointe, known to his family as "Guy", was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. After graduating from Northridge High School in 1966, he moved to nearby Clayton and worked as a mail carrier in Englewood. LaPointe was a nature lover and an avid hiker.[1]

LaPointe was drafted in 1968 and declared himself a conscientious objector. He was trained as a combat medic and sent to Vietnam in November 1968.[1] By June 2 of the next year, he was a Specialist Four serving with the 2nd Squadron, 17th Cavalry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. On that day, he participated in a patrol on Hill 376 in Quang Tin province. When his unit came under heavy fire from entrenched enemy forces and took several casualties, LaPointe ran through the automatic weapons fire to reach two wounded men at the head of the patrol. He treated the soldiers and shielded them with his body, even after being twice wounded, until an enemy grenade killed all three men. For these actions, he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor in January 1972.[2] His other decorations include the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and National Defense Service Medal.[1] He left a "widow, Cindy LaPointe [now] Dafler, and [a] son Joseph G. LaPointe III, who ...never met his father."[1]

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