D-Day Fails

[maltesefalcon]

lol I'm raising the odds here and go on to say:

What if Hitler had an A-Bomb ready for D-Day and drops it on the invasion force?

The invasion front was 50 miles wide and the fleet was miles off shore. Also there were troops sent ahead in gliders and parachutes.

Not only that there were many more troops and equipment in England ready for backup.

Assume the proposed bomb had the weight and yield of the Hiroshima bomb. Use of such a device would certainly cause massive casualties, including potentially civilians and German troops.

But the spread out nature of the invasion ensured that a contemporary nuclear device could not wipe out the force.

Not only that the Western allies still had considerable forces in Italy plus the Dragoon forces ready to invade southern France.

Tactical use of a nuke in this case would not really help Germany's odds.

[Richard Anderson]

I took that one under Flannigan back in 1979. At the time I missed his point about the relative merits of Original Documents vs Eyewitnesses as reliable sources. Decades later after reflecting on the fakery and sloppiness I witnessed in the writing of those 'Original Documents' I started to recall and understand his warning.

I hope his warning was balanced with remarks about over reliance on the accuracy of eyewitnesses as well. Neither documentary or memoir is infallible and both have their pitfalls. You just have to try not to throw out the baby with the bathwater if you run into a problem with one or the other.

[Richard Anderson]

The only reasonable departure I've seen for a failed Neptune operation is if a serious storm abruptly develops on the night of 6th or 7th June, after the landings start.

Given that the landing decision was based upon a mistaken weather analysis that is possible, but barely so. The portents of the later storm were seen early enough that something similar would have aborted D-Day. It was the impact of the later storm on the mulberries which wasn't foreseen.

[T. A. Gardner]

lol I'm raising the odds here and go on to say:

What if Hitler had an A-Bomb ready for D-Day and drops it on the invasion force?

By what means? Assuming that the bomb weighed about 4,000 lbs. and was fairly large there are few choices of aircraft to deliver such a weapon. Also, it would have to be delivered within the first say 3 hours of the invasion being detected or it will only be a delay of the inevitable. That is, if it is dropped the evening of the first day of the invasion, it's too late. The invasion is ashore and isn't leaving.

[maltesefalcon]

lol I'm raising the odds here and go on to say:

What if Hitler had an A-Bomb ready for D-Day and drops it on the invasion force?

By what means? Assuming that the bomb weighed about 4,000 lbs. and was fairly large there are few choices of aircraft to deliver such a weapon. Also, it would have to be delivered within the first say 3 hours of the invasion being detected or it will only be a delay of the inevitable. That is, if it is dropped the evening of the first day of the invasion, it's too late. The invasion is ashore and isn't leaving.

Agreed. Add to that a very bold assumption that the Luftwaffe could get a heavy bomber from some unknown base to the drop zone without being detected and shot down first.

Stir in the fact that Hitler believed for some days that the Normandy invasion was only a decoy operation and that a much stronger force was expected in Pas de Calais.

So they really had no idea what was happening. With little or no prior reconnaisance the pilot would have no idea where the best target areas were.

[Carl Schwamberger]

I took that one under Flannigan back in 1979. At the time I missed his point about the relative merits of Original Documents vs Eyewitnesses as reliable sources. Decades later after reflecting on the fakery and sloppiness I witnessed in the writing of those 'Original Documents' I started to recall and understand his warning.

I hope his warning was balanced with remarks about over reliance on the accuracy of eyewitnesses as well. Neither documentary or memoir is infallible and both have their pitfalls. You just have to try not to throw out the baby with the bathwater if you run into a problem with one or the other.

His comments were a lot more complex than that and focused on how witness reliability, motivation, training, & time factors influenced any evidence. He also remarked on the reverse of that, the agenda and examination or analytic skill skill of the researcher influenced the conversion of evidence into narrative.

To digress; Flannigans doctorial thesis in economics was based on the future economy of the Cezchoslovakian nation. Just week before completion Germany occupied Bohemia, rendering his three years of work meaningless. Flannigan joked that his service in WWII was a personal vendetta.

The only reasonable departure I've seen for a failed Neptune operation is if a serious storm abruptly develops on the night of 6th or 7th June, after the landings start.

Given that the landing decision was based upon a mistaken weather analysis that is possible, but barely so. The portents of the later storm were seen early enough that something similar would have aborted D-Day. It was the impact of the later storm on the mulberries which wasn't foreseen.

Sure, its a long shot. To digress again; RAdm Ellesberg was the senior USN salvage officer present at the A Mulberry post storm. He indicated the principle source of the damage to the inner harbor was the lighter craft in it slipping their anchors and ramming the docks. While he did discuss the floating breakwaters breaking loose and damaging the Phenix cassions and Gooseberry ships badly he also describes the mass of light craft wind driven onto the shore and docks. Clearing that mass of light craft was indicated as the larger part of restoring the harbor.

[T. A. Gardner]

To drop a Hiroshima sized nuclear weapon you'd need a plane capable of:

1. Lifting about a 2,000 kg to 2,500 kg payload as a single large bomb to the needed altitude.
2. Flying at about 10,000 meters / 30,000 feet
3. Making close to 650 kph (400 mph) when unloaded.
4. Accurately aiming on a target from that altitude.

You'd need all that to deliver the bomb and the bomber having any real chance of escaping before the weapon went off. That makes delivery of the weapon very much a difficult proposition as the Germans have very few, if any aircraft available in mid 1944 that meet those criteria. They have a number that meet some of those, but not all, in some numbers.

[maltesefalcon]

To drop a Hiroshima sized nuclear weapon you'd need a plane capable of:

1. Lifting about a 2,000 kg to 2,500 kg payload as a single large bomb to the needed altitude.
2. Flying at about 10,000 meters / 30,000 feet
3. Making close to 650 kph (400 mph) when unloaded.
4. Accurately aiming on a target from that altitude.

You'd need all that to deliver the bomb and the bomber having any real chance of escaping before the weapon went off. That makes delivery of the weapon very much a difficult proposition as the Germans have very few, if any aircraft available in mid 1944 that meet those criteria. They have a number that meet some of those, but not all, in some numbers.

HE177 could probably be configured to do this and come close to the specs given. I would suspect that the bomber would not even need to drop the weapon. They could just do a barametric fuse and descend to the target like on Fail Safe.

Overwhelming Allied air superiority means there is not much chance of survival for the crew in any case. Just getting to the target area without being mauled by Allied planes would be tough.

[Carl Schwamberger]

... the Germans have very few, if any aircraft available in mid 1944 that meet those criteria. They have a number that meet some of those, but not all, in some numbers.

Given the lead time developing the weapon it does not seem a severe challenge to modify a aircraft for the task.

There are some out of the box solutions as well. One would be to scale up a V1 to carry the payload. That approach gets you away from the altitude and egress considerations. If the intent is to use it as a anti invasion weapon then range need not be all that. If the attack is made in the evening of D1 its very unlikely any Allied interceptor will notice the flying bomb, let alone make a intercept.

[maltesefalcon]

We're really splitting hairs over a non-issue. If Germany truly had a working weapon they could simply put it on a large vehicle and drive it to the front. Once they made contact with Allied troops they could detonate it.
Failing that they could secrete it near the front and wait for the Allies to arrive.
(I ws going to suggest putting it in the Eiffel tower and doing an airburst from there, but Christopher Walken needs it for his own use. Lol.)

In any case transport was a minor issue compared to making a working weapon large enough to defeat the landing forces. That would require megaton scale weaponry which was more than a decade away.

[paulrward]

Hello All ;


I have been silently following this thread for some time with interest. I note that there are essentially three schools of thought: The First, that the D-Day Invasion was inevitably going to be successful , the Second, that it could have been reversed with normal means, and Third, an invocation of what some alternate historians term, ' Alien Space Bats ', ( such as, Hitler gets the A-Bomb in May 1944 )

The landings on June 6 were not, in my opinion, inevitably going to be successful. The issues at Omaha could have also occurred on the other beaches, the weather front ( always unpredictable ) might have caused more disruption to the Airborne than it historically did, and, like Gallipoli, Guadalcanal, and Tarawa, there might have been mistakes made on the Allied side that could have resulted in disasters on a local level that might combine into an overall defeat for the Allied forces on June 6.

As for the D-Day invasion being a sure thing, at the height of the fighting, General Eisenhower prepared a brief press release, which he later gave as a souvenir to his Aide, Captain Butcher:

"Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."


With this in mind, it might be worth considering what would have happened if the D-Day landings HAD failed. In other words, what would have been the effect on the Allies, both physical and moral, as well as how it would have affected their strategy going forward. Could another attempt have been made in late summer of 1944 ? Or, with the loss of the three airborne divisions and the effective strength of five or six division lost on the beaches have put a second attempt off until 1945?

With the Soviets on the move in the East, would a second attempt have been necessary to defeat the Reich ? Would Dragoon have gone forward, and bogged down like the Italian Campaign ?
If the Reich had survived until summer of 1945, could they have developed an A-Bomb ? ( Speaking as someone who knows some Physics, the answer would probably have been "NO", but they might have been able to develop a "Fallout Bomb", or "Dirty Bomb", by wrapping a conventional explosive around a casing containing uranium dust ) And, if the Reich had survived until August, 1945, what would have happened if there had been a ' Berlin ' instead of a 'Hiroshima' ?


Respectfully ;

Paul R. Ward

[maltesefalcon]

Good points above. I replied mostly to the very minute possibility of an attempt to nuke the invasion force.
The original poster mentioned complete failure.

The D-Day invasion was actually both a success and a failure. A success obviously in that the troops gained a beachhead without being repulsed. Also a success because the channel remained unmolested by German naval or air forces sufficient to jeopardize the shipping to follow.

But there was still some failure. Omaha did not go quite as well as hoped. The amphibious Shermans were more hazardous to their own crews than to the Wehrmacht. Only the Canadians at Juno reached their actual objective on that day. Some tropps died needlessly attacking empty coastal gun emplacements.

Couple this with the fact that Eisenhower expected Pyrrhic losses in the initial waves and the airborne element, even if all the other objectives were achieved.

This pre-recognition of acceptable losses and acceptance that one or two lodgements may stall or be repulsed peaks to the flexibility and resolve of the Allied High Command.

For this reason I don't believe any catastrophic event in one area (like use of a tactical nuke) could upset the overall plan.

Also don't believe major setbacks in Normandy would change the timeline or result that much. Dragoon was well in hand, Italy was a done deal and the Russians were unstoppable.

Also the bulk of the Normandy campaign forces were still in England-safe to fight another day somewhere.

[OpanaPointer]

Historiography is the study of how to NOT do history, required first semester course for grad students doing history. Also required to get a Bachelors in History, at least at Purdue. I got Stinnett's book on Pearl Harbor included one year.

I took that one under Flannigan back in 1979. At the time I missed his point about the relative merits of Original Documents vs Eyewitnesses as reliable sources. Decades later after reflecting on the fakery and sloppiness I witnessed in the writing of those 'Original Documents' I started to recall and understand his warning.

ie: during Desert Storm 4th Battalion 14th Marines was organized as a 18 cannon unit with three different cannon models. But you cannot prove it via the offcial USMC records. Through a major administrative error the records that would prove all that were not generated & retained. That is no Reporting Unit Code assigned, so no ERO Matrix created, no documentation of the transfer of the equipment from the Reserve system to the Active equpment accountability system... The Reserve Admin system badly botched the tracking of reservists ordered to active service and did equally badly in tracking their return to reserve status afterwards. We wasted considerable man hours trying to correct the post war documentation and gave up trying to do anything about the period during the Desert Storm activation. US military records are relatively accurate, but I'd never take a single page as gospel without crosschecking somehow.

I was twenty-plus years behind you. But the rule still applied. (I did the undergrad class as well, "Soviet Cinema". I got to do "Alexander Nevsky".)

[Carl Schwamberger]

Historiography is the study of how to NOT do history, required first semester course for grad students doing history. Also required to get a Bachelors in History, at least at Purdue. I got Stinnett's book on Pearl Harbor included one year.

I took that one under Flannigan back in 1979. At the time I missed his point about the relative merits of Original Documents vs Eyewitnesses as reliable sources. Decades later after reflecting on the fakery and sloppiness I witnessed in the writing of those 'Original Documents' I started to recall and understand his warning.

I was twenty-plus years behind you. But the rule still applied. (I did the undergrad class as well, "Soviet Cinema". I got to do "Alexander Nevsky".)

No movies in Flannigans course. It could have been deadly dull but he had a sly sense of humor & engaging delivery.

[OpanaPointer]

My prof. for the undergrad course was a "Pinko". He attended Moscow U. after the third worlders stopped sending their people there. He didn't like me much, I once told him that "I'm not a Communist, but I used to kill them."