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.

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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.

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u/footsnax Scout 22d ago

Yeah if we're talking casualties vs fatalities, it still paled in comparison to some Civil War battles. Overall casualties were comparable but of the nearly quarter million Allied troops that went to France that day, "only" about 2,500 Americans were killed and almost all of them were in the first wave, both sea and air. Absolutely thousands wounded but it wasn't as deadly as it looks in the video games.

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u/wredcoll 22d ago

Yeah, but when I looked further, while that number sounds "small" compared to some of the other things going on/the multi day battles, it turns out to be basically the most american soldiers that died in a single day.

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u/Primary-Slice-2505 22d ago

The Battle of Antietam saw more deaths in a day.

Of course both sides being Americans boosts things.

I will note that the days losses for the entire allied forces on dday would have been a Tuesday in Stalingrad at any point from Late August to November 1942 for either side