@aequitas:
@Octospire:
@Dylan:
@aequitas:
Dunkirk was the stolen Victory…Dieppe just a disaster and D-Day just the weirdest Landing ever…
weirdest landing that was a do or die situation for the Allies.
I think do or die is a bit of a overstatement. They could of failed and still won the war, in my opinion D-Day mainly served the purpose of liberating Western Europe before the Soviets got to the English Channel. The Allies still had their beach head in Italy and even if the entire invasion force was annihalated it was only 150,000 men, thats less than what the British brought back from Dunkirk in operation dynamo. I know it seems a bit cold to say its only 150,000 casualties but in the grand scheme of a World War the allies would of recovered to try again else where, they still had all of the ships and equipment for another landing.
-as I mentioned it in this Forum somewhere allready, the total numbers of casulties for the 13 Phase long Normandy campaigne was arround 250.000 men and officers on the Allies side…this was the number the United Staff of U.S Army figured as casulties for the whole “liberating Operation” from D-day to Berlin would be…crazy isn’t ?..
Allied casualty projections have always been woefully low, especially those projections made by the U.S High command for campaigns like Iwo Jima or Okinawa. The United States brass continually underestimated both the Nazi’s and the Japanese especially their resolve to win at such a high cost in men and equipment. If the U.S high command took the Germans seriously there wouldnt of been only 1 understrength division defending the entire Ardennes in late 1944, if the Germans had greater resources they may very well of split the allied forces in half and repeated their successes they had during the battle of France, thankfully though allied strategic bombing destroyed much of the Nazi’s industrial capacity and most of the German troops were occupied on the Eastern front.
D-Day wasnt just a triumph of the military might of the allied forces it was more a triumph of the vast deceptions that made the Normady landings possible, like the false intelligence provided to the Germans that said the landings would be at Calais or the false invasion fleet that tricked the Germans into thinking that there would be an invasion in Norway. These operations made sure allied forces got ashore safely and that they werent at the mercy of a counter attack from greater numbers of infantry and possibly 3 or 4 Panzer divisions.
