Kind of a cool picture… but it seems I’ve been lied to all my life about this event…
156,000 ground troops, and only 4930 casualties…
I thought Normandy was an absolute massacre.
another interesting fact that i didn’t know wast the 83,000 brits and canadians out of the 156K troops.
i feel like there is a typo in the description of the navy
71,213 + 4,126 + 736 + 864 != 6,939
But that’s probably the number of troops onboard…
I was under the impression omaha beach was the slaughter.
1200 people in an hour seems pretty bad.
The front lines should have been made up of French Canadians… it’s not like anybody would have missed them.
omaha beach was the massacre. the air support didn’t arrive before the ground troops
there was actually 5 beaches. Omaha, Juno Gold Sword and one other one i cant think of. Every beach besides omaha had pretty much flawless execution. Thats because on every other beach, the tanks made it to the shore, but on omaha beach, the boat carrying the tanks was sunk so it was just infantry with no tank support so lots of people died, basically because there was nothing to hide behind. The beach itselfs was pretty small and pretty much all of those casualties happened on omaha beach.
I guess we disagree on our definitions of “massacre”. 4930 in one day is a massacre by my definition.
That’s one day. In all the years of the Iraq war there have been 4323.
2,974 died in the 9/11 attacks, plus the 19 hijackers but they don’t count.
I’m Canadian and I agree with this statement.
Utah
yes, but u have to figure that those 4K+people all died in a span of 4-5 hours.
that IS a massacre
Slightly OT, The World At War has some absolutely insane video footage from these events… as well as the rest of the war… If you have any interest in ww2, then you should probably watch that series.
you should PM big E with this information.
its an amazing place, go if you can
kinda spooky at the same time, tons of bomb craters and mangled bunkers still there
omaha was a massacre, the Germans were picking off the Rangers as they tried to scale the cliffs
The biggest massacre no one ever talks about much was the first day of the battle of the Somme in 1916. 20,000 British soldiers were killed in one day, thats dead, not counting wounded or missing. They thought it would be a cake walk as the bombardment lasted a good time before the assult and over a million shells were fired into the german positions. They kicked soccer balls in front of them as they charged across no mans land, then the germans popped up out of their bomb shelters and the slaughter began.
Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo dwarf Somme numbers.
Hey great people. I doubt I’m the only one here that thought the Storming of normandy was a 50% death rate at least.
People talk about Ohh my gramps was on the beach in normandy during the invasion… YAY!!! He’s 1 of the other 99% that lived!
I was reffering to combat death numbers of soldiers. You speak of civillian deaths, and yes these raids claimed hundreds of thousands.
If we are talking just massive death rates might as well mention the spanish flu of 1918 which started to spread first in the trenches of the western front.
sorry i just figured combat deaths (more specifically ww 1 and 2 era) in general. even though those numbers include both soldiers and civilians.
not to mention the complete mess with the airborne drops, lots of those guys died too because of missing their LZ’s.