Howcome the Allies didn't blanket the beach with smoke shells before sending in thousands of unprotected infantrymen to assault concrete bunkers head on?
Why didn't the LCVP's have smoke launchers that would have fired before the ramp opened to conceal the disembarking infantry?
because germans had big fans that went wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooosh
But only two Luftwaffe planes sortied on D-Day.
It was never about trying to save lives
Gotta see where you’re going moron
Obscuring the battlefield works both ways. You can think of plenty of reasons why reducing the sight of a huge orginised naval landing attack would be a bad idea.
They had already bombarded the shit out of the defensive lines with actual bombs & shells to limited effectiveness, and the people piloting the landing craft need to fricking see where they are going. Beaches still have rocks and shit in the way, let alone the tank traps the Germans put down.
>They had already bombarded the shit out of the defensive lines with actual bombs & shells to limited effectiveness
it's called they missed by miles and hit towns inland.
>Deploy smoke barrage
>It also obscures the shallows
>Landing craft get fricked by obstacles
>infantry have no idea wtf is going on
>Armor can't get off the craft
OP is a homosexual
They did lay smoke. That wasn't the issue. The issue was the fact that every single allied bomber missed their targets and dropped all of their bombs too far inland to hit the beach. Read a book
Didn't you play Battlefield 1942? Distance rendering on Omaha Beach was really low.
Smoking causes cancer you idiot, they wanted save lives, not kill themselves. Read a book or 2 on history op
You've watched too many movies. Most of the allied troops landed without resistance. The entire coast was not fortified.
All the landings were absolutely contested and all the beaches on D-Day were fortified, to one extent or another.
gay question from OP. Let's instead discuss why the Germans did not use a persistent chemical weapon like sulfur mustard or VX gas. These were prepared defensive positions, and landing on beaches slimed with oily VX would probably have bought the German army enough time to reinforce. The allies did not have an antidote to the G or V series chemical weapons, nor was the protective equipment adequate.
>krauts did not suspect Normady would be the target
>using chemical weapons would also mean the allied would do the same to them
>even in the best case scenario chemical weapons aren't really effective to justify using in most cases
Allies would start gas bombing German cities.
>Let's instead discuss why the Germans did not use a persistent chemical weapon like sulfur mustard or VX gas.
Because Hitler had a thing against chemical weapons after WWI. A lot of people did.
Also because Germany had no meaningful strategic bombing capability and the allies had a ton of it. Kicking off chemical warfare would have been a very, very, very bad time when allied bombers started dropping it on German cities.
Also as others have noted, chemical weapons are overblown. They're very good at making an area horrible and causing indiscriminate harm to the civilian population. They're a really questionable increase in efficacy against actual fighting forces.
>Berlin gets gas bombed a week later
Anon, chemical weapons were not an unknown quantity. Everyone had gas masks, and everyone kept massive stocks of chemical weapons near the front lines just in case anyone let that particular genie out of the bottle
The worst thing about chems is not their direct effect. The worst thing is forcing everyone to wear the most annoying, heat stress inducing protective gear known to warfare.
Hitler and everyone else knew it wasn't worth it. Everyone not sure should work 12-hour shifts in a hot summer under MOPP 4.
The disaster at Bari where a ship loaded with mustard got zapped by the Luftwaffe is an epic example of how shitty chems are.
The Germans didn't know if the Allies had also developed nerve gas.
Because if the krauts dropped a thousand tons of VX on the beaches, Harris would respond by dropping ten thousand tons of chlorine and mustard gas on Berlin.
Not to rian on that parade, but nobody had protective equipment effective against nerve agents. The nazis uncorking that shit would have killed a shitload of allied soldier, for all that the retaliation would have been worse.
Mg42 firing rate is so fast that it'll blow all the smoke back towards the allies
Would have been effective yes, 90% of the posters in this thread are tards.
>cover the battlefield in smoke
>can't see objective
>get lost and shoot each other in confusion
>smoke the entire area
>walk into the enemy's prepared killzone completely blind
>?????
>die
>21 posts
>not one mention of the fact that the beach is windy
The point of the war was to kill excess men as they are going to do again shortly, why would they use smoke? Uykraine is just a warm up exercise.
>bro its just to kill excess men trust me
this is moron reasoning since far more civilians including women died in wars like this so you are still stuck with more "excess" men not helped by the fact every guy that dies is a guy you can no longer tax in the future or be used as an employee for a company, which is why despite having excess men china isn't starting wars to get rid of them because at the end of the day if they can be exploitable workers that make money why get rid of them
Just because you're getting cucked doesn't mean there's a conspiracy to conscript all men your age
Not sure about the smoke but the allowed had a plan to send planes before the landing to make craters so they could use it as cover but the planes ether missed the beaches or the weather was bad and t they couldn't do any bombings wonder if there's such a thing as smoke shells battleships could fire if so why was it not used
1.) winds would blow it away, probably into your own landing force
2.) would obscure your own landings and cause shit to crash into each other
3.) would blind air and naval support
Would be a really moronic idea all around
Because the landing zones and objectives were designated using landmarks and waypoint that landing craft pilots and soldiers needed to be able to see because it was 1942 and GPS didn't exist. Smoke can also benefit the enemy.
The only way the invasion could've happened was the way it did. Obscuring a battlefield with smoke can be effective if placed effectively. If not it can have the opposite effect. For them to effectively use smoke on Normandy they would have had to place it directly on top of enemy positions, which would've been nearly impossible with the intelligence they had and the technology at the time. It likely would've ended up landing on the beach and benefited the Germans. Pic related.
Smoke on vehicles like AFVs, Tanks, patrol boats, landing craft etc are meant for tactical retreats more than anything not as a means to conceal an assault. In methods where they are used for assaults the use of thermal optics is employed, which again didn't exist in 1942.
You think D-Day was this huge, titanic battle. Then you grow up and realize there was only like 4500 killed. Basically the average tuesday on the eastern front or in china, or in ww1.
It was pretty big for an amphibious landing, the largest that's ever been conducted, that's what makes it impressive, not the troop size
>smokes beach
>the entire allied fleet now can't support the landings due to the smoke
>LCIs suppose to land in 1 sector land 2 sectors away
>entire battalions are split between 3 beaches
bravo, OP, you are truly smart.
who cares about something from this long ago you gay homosexual
They did. The problem was that the shore tends to be windy and most of the bombardments missed so all the Allies had were smoke grenades. The end result was that smoke grenades were only useful for the last hundred paces or so.
>Smoke screen in the first picture on wikipedia
That smoke was launched by the Germans.
maybe because it blinds your own troops as well and your CAS aircraft
Why didn't the Germans use their unlimited respawns since they were playing as the defenders?
>e sending in thousands of unprotected infantrymen to assault concrete bunkers head on?
they did not send unprotected infantrymen to assault them head on
soldiers made it to the shingle bank where they were pinned down
they didnt advance until a destroyer sailed to 100m of the beach and fired its 5in guns directly into enemy positions
they also had about 60 tanks to help them reduce enemy positions
so they very slowly creeped up inland under naval gunfire with armored support
why do we keep seeing the exact same thread with the exact same OP anyways?
The landing craft needed to be able to find their landing zones and avoid beach obstacles.
Smoke, like tracers, work for both sides.
Every smoke mission I’ve ever seen has resulted in catastrophic failure. Wrong place, smoke goes the wrong direction, it’s a dud, etc. The army is institutionally moronic when it comes to screening troop movements.
Have you ever lived near the beach? There's a land breeze in the early morning because the land gets colder than the sea during the night. The smoke would hinder the attackers far more than the defenders.
OP it's not P'yatykhatky it's the fricking beach.
Smoke blows away with wind. If it's loaded in a cannon it's more use trying to kill shit in that circumstance. Smoke is supposed to be used conditionally, and conditions around D-day were actually fairly shit.
Why didn't the U.S. send an Iowa to Normandy?
iowas were their most modern battleships so they were prioritized in the pacific
the lack of a german surface navy meant that their specific abilities would not be very useful in the atlantic
so they sent the older standard-classes to europe where they were used as floating gun platforms to blast german positions
the USS texas, a super dreadnought, was on hand to assist at omaha beach
it proved important in knocking out heavy gun batteries that were overlooking the beach
but more importantly, the battleships were used to break up german counter attacks on the week succeeding D-day
with them being used to pin down any german counter-attack
Because the actual layout of the beaches didn't look like the fricking movies. Any bunker with an opening directly facing the beach would have been a smoking pile of concrete and liquefied nazi due to the ship guns
Bloody Omaha happened more because of bad tactics than because it was a tough battlefield and I'm tired of pretending it's not.
>Bloody Omaha happened more because of bad tactics
tactics were good
initial barrage failed due to poor visibility but they adapted very quickly
> than because it was a tough battlefield and I'm tired of pretending it's not.
planners knew from the start that omaha was the easiest beach to defend
so they layered redundancies so that in case each step failed they could fall back on another one
omaha was prevented from getting worse than it already was thanks to their tactical competency
on other beaches like utah, the troops practically walked on to the beaches thanks to everything going according to plan