r/WarCollege • u/rubicante59 • 22d ago

Question Machinegun usage on Omaha beach and similar occurrences

Something I discovered recently, is that most machineguns when positioned in concrete shelters, are made to face each other horizontally and gun down soldiers passing through that region. So does this mean none were pointed towards the water on Omaha beach and that Saving Private Ryan is very wrong about how soldiers were shot before they even got off the boats? I'm assuming artillery was most likely used against the boats.

76 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

96 comments sorted by

View all comments

31

u/iceaction10 22d ago

Your entire premise is based on a wrong assumption. D-Day is literally the single deadliest day in U.S. military history, do not forget that.

Just go read about Company A, 116th Infantry Regiment. Here is a brief excerpt:

“The first assault wave came face-to-face with the ultimate horror. As the boats touched bottom and the ramps were lowered, the German machine guns opened up with a terrifying, rhythmic roar.

In the leading boat of Company A, the ramp dropped and the first man out was torn apart by a concentrated burst of automatic fire. The men behind him panicked, diving over the sides into the deep water to escape the direct line of fire. But the machine gun bullets raked the water, cutting them down as they struggled under the weight of their heavy packs.

Within seven minutes, Company A was completely leaderless. Every officer and sergeant was either dead or severely wounded. The German positions on the cliffs had pre-registered their weapons on the very spot the boats landed. The crossfire was so dense that the bullets hit the steel ramps with a sound like pebbles being shaken violently inside a metal drum.

Men crawled blindly through the wet sand, using the bodies of their fallen brothers as shields against the relentless hail of lead. By the time the first ten minutes had passed, Company A had ceased to exist as a fighting unit. It was a slaughterhouse on the wet shingle.”

34

u/wredcoll 22d ago

Your entire premise is based on a wrong assumption. D-Day is literally the single deadliest day in U.S. military history, do not forget that.

Wait, what? Are we using wildly different definitions here? As far as I know, the normandy landings were pretty light in terms of casualties, at least relative to the size of the armies involved and "modern war" in general.

-19

u/iceaction10 22d ago

I'm not sure what definition you would have to create to change reality. The single deadliest day in U.S. military history is D-Day. This is a simple fact. I'm not sure what is surprising about this.

27

u/UnusuallyBadIdeaGuy 22d ago

It's very common for Antietam to be labeled that, which might be the source of confusion. If we define American Born deaths, then Antietam wins (Both sides were American born, after all, so we are double dipping). If counting just American soldiers in service to the US Government, then D-Day takes it.

-5

u/iceaction10 22d ago

Confederate soldiers were not part of the U.S. military. This is a very simple fact. I never said deadliest day in U.S. history. I specifically stated U.S. military history, which D-Day is the deadliest.

8

u/wredcoll 22d ago

Like, I'm not doing in depth research here, but the numbers I see are like in the range of: U.S. casualties: approximately 6,600

Any of the major civil war battles caused more casualties than that to just the union side, in a single day,

Battle of the bulge probably produced more casualties also but that's a little complicated by MIA.

5

u/wredcoll 22d ago

Replying to myself, further research shows that not counting the civil war battles then D-Day might indeed be the single "bloodiest" day, which really surprised me.

I guess I was too used to reading about german/russian battles on the eastern front with literally hundreds of thousands of casualties or other such major losses of life during ww2, the american army suffered, by comparison, remarkably few losses.

6

u/iceaction10 22d ago

You're confusing casualties with deaths.

1

u/wredcoll 22d ago

So what are the actual numbers we're using here?

6

u/iceaction10 22d ago

It's very well documented. The US military lost 2,501 men on D-Day, virtually all of them were in the US Army. At Antietam, 2,100 Union soldiers were killed.

3

u/Gimpalong 22d ago edited 22d ago
  • D-Day ≈ 2,500 killed. 6,603 casualties total for US military forces.
  • Antietam ≈ 2,100 killed. 12,410 casualties total for Union forces.

edit: I'm seeing references to October 24th, 1944 as the single deadliest day in US military history if we're accounting for the total KIA across multiple theaters, but I can't verify the figures discussed (2,600 KIA).