….could D-Day have still been successful? Like if Omaha Beach would have had to be evacuated?
Strategically it was kind of in the center of the invasion beaches, and was the most touch-and-go, by-the-hair-on-your-ass objective. The most costly also. But all the other beachheads were successful with less problems. Could D-Day have survived without success at Omaha?
If only Omaha had failed the overall assault would probably have still succeeded. If 2 beaches had failed then I think it would have been a disaster.
Germany was already on the cusp of collapse so who knows.
Sure it could have, but would have taken longer. Remember you have Utah Beach, Point Du Hoc and the British beaches of Gold, Juno, etc. I was talking with my 96 year old father in law today and he was a Buck Sergeant with the 2nd battalion, 16th Infantry Regt. Ist Infantry Division, stationed in Dorchester, England for training before the invasion. He was in the 2nd wave at Easy Red, Omaha Beach. He was carrying a radio telephone and a Thompson machine gun. They were offloaded into the landing craft at 2:30am and sailed in circles until their time to storm the beach. He said they were all so seasick, they didn’t care if they lived or died - they wanted off the LC.
They found the 1st Wave all bunched up, not making any progress. As he got behind a tank obstacle, his radio telephone on his back was hit by German fire and destroyed. He dumped it and made his way across the open sand to more cover and grabbed one section of a Bangalore Torpedo and went with another infantryman up to a heavily barbed wire section by one of the lanes inland. He helped assemble the Bangalore Torpedo, slid it under the wire and was shot twice in the left leg as he tried to move away from the impending explosion. He dragged himself back and laid for hours until he got medical treatment. He was sent back across the channel later that same day and spent two weeks in an English hospital before checking himself out, and finding the next transport across the channel to join his unit. He fought across France, Belgium, Germany and into Czechoslovakia before returning home in December 1945.
From 1946-1949 he went to college, did ROTC, and went back into the Army as a 2LT in 1950. Really tough gentleman, however when the movie Saving Private Ryan was released, he didn’t want to see it nor re-live it all. He has never gone back to Normandy.
The Commonwealth landings were successful further east. Abandoning the single beach wouldn’t have immediately doomed the landings. As the narrow Omaha landing was flanked by Utah and the British beaches. Moreover, the worsening weather in the days following might have made a second Dieppe evacuation difficult at best.
Omaha was important to overcoming resistance, but most important was the planned use for the Mulberries prefab port sections. In the end, the Omaha Beach Mulberry only operated for a short time before being disabled by bad weather. It still was a major logistical hub and the main fuel delivery point.
Tell him men like him are the reason why I and many of the men I served with joined. We could only have hoped to fill a fraction of their boots.
Even if we never successfully opened up a western front, eventually Berlin was going to get nuked.
We designed the bomb for Germany, not Japan.
V2 rockets, Me262s, Stg45 rifles and all the other tech advances of the Germans would ultimately have been meaningless because eventually Berlin was going to get nuked. The only other thing that “may” have changed is the Russian’s might have blitzed all the way to the Atlantic wall if we failed to establish a foothold.
And come the end of the war, they may or may not have retreated to previously agreed areas of occupation. Probably under threat of “the bomb” but the cold war would have arrived a lot sooner.
That is an understatement. Kudos to his FIL and all his buddies.
I can’t even image what these men went thought. This statement is as genuine as it gets: He said they were all so seasick, they didn’t care if they lived or died - they wanted off the LC. clearly from someone who has been there and done that. David
Didn’t want to start a new thread, but this is awesome.
https://time.com/5601223/d-day-veteran-97-parachutes-normandy/
For the second time in his life, Tom Rice, a 97-year-old from San Diego, has parachuted into Normandy. Wednesday’s feat, however, was a lot more joyous than his first jump three-quarters of a century earlier.
Rice’s leap was part of the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the allied invasion of the French region of Normandy that began on June 6, 1944, and marked a turning point in World War II. Among the commemorative events was a parachute jump, which included Rice and about 200 other parachutists.
“It went perfect, perfect jump,” he said, according to the Associated Press.
Rice jumped in tandem from a C-47 transporter Wednesday and landed in the same area as his first jump — outside the Normandy town of Carentan, the site of a key WWII battle.
Not to derail the thread, but here’s another thought. What if they HAD gone in at Calais, under Patton’s plan - WITH Patton commanding - against all those Panzers? Could they still have succeeded?
Probably, just because we have more of more. But a lot more would be lost.
Interesting that this just popped up,http://thesilicongraybeard.blogspot.com/2019/06/germanys-lost-wwii-uranium-and-how.html?m=1
It is a glimpse of how close the Germans were to an Atomic Bomb !!!
Your grandfather will forever be a greater man that I am.
If D Day had failed, the world would be a dark and horrible place.
Europe wouldn’t be full of Arabs and Somalis.
Trannies wouldn’t be in our schools and libraries “reading” to our kids.
Homos wouldn’t be parading in the streets and sodomizing each other and recruiting more gays by sexually abusing adolescents and kids.
A real nightmare scenario!!!
I hope you’re being facetious.
Benito, you grow wearisome.
Politics notwithstanding…America has never had a problem sending its children to die for other people.
We would have kept tossing bodies and tossing bodies until we won.
Then, as usual, sent more people to rebuild.
We have urban blight at home we do nothing about.
I’m not a bleeding heart and I’m not a hawk…and while it makes for good TV to see a boogie woogie boy from Company B run up and punch a Nazi or a Viet Cong or Haji…
He was still someone’s child that family wont get back for someone elses victory. I feel like sometimes…sometimes…America is the world’s Foreign Legion.
Nobody cares.
I saw that video on Facebook. Ninety-freaking-seven years old! That man will pass someday with a smile on his face. Can you imagine living to 97, in his shape no less which is a gift in and of itself, but to actually do what you did when you were 20? Minus the MG tracers and flak popping all over the place of course! Something tells me that old man thought of things he hadn’t in a l-o-n-g time. Probably also found out that his adrenal glands still work just fine! 
You must certainly be aware that there are times we actually DO need to break things and kill people, right? Like legit? WWII is one of those times. Afghanistan after 9-11 (not necessarily continuing for 18 years later) had to be done.
I know you’re throwing this out there, but as a cop no less you surely know that there are times you need to do what you might instinctively avoid. Like “Hell, I really don’t want to do this but someone needs an ass-whooping”.