Just watched Saving Private Ryan again, ***Q about D-Day***

[Tom]

"The sad thing is, given the circumstances and situation, you probably couldn't even find 2400 people to even volunteer for this mission today. Men are not quite what they used to be, that's for damn sure."


What do we have, 100,000 in Iraq right now ? I haven't heard too many stories about deserters..

 

[Rogue]

Actually, there haven't been many "deserters" in the legal definition, but there have been plenty of soldiers that have come up with chronic back problems, knee problems, asthma for the first time in their life, etc. I'm a soldier myself, so I don't make that statement uninformed of our men and women in uniform's capability or drive for what they believe in. Today's military is spoiled on technology and dazzling weaponry. Trust me, if our troops had gone into a major kill zone the size of Normany in Iraq, there would have been many crying, whining, sniveling men and women going into it. Nowhere near the bravery of those young men in the Normandy assault.

 

[GasX]

Originally posted by: Staples

Originally posted by: Bootprint
Don't forget they also dropped some troops in gliders more inland.

Well, never seen the movie but this part about dropping troops inland is exactly what you play in Call of Duty. That game is really cool and makes you feel like you are in the war itself.

does your best friend get his brains blown into your lap? Not really the same is it?

 

[AndrewR]

Originally posted by: Rogue
Despite the loss of life, this extract below looks like a resouning success in the mission to me:

By nightfall the 1st and 29th divisions held positions around Vierville, Saint-Laurent, and Colleville?nowhere near the planned objectives, but they had a toe-hold. The Americans suffered 2,400 casualties at Omaha on June 6, but by the end of the day they had landed 34,000 troops. The German 352nd Division lost 20 percent of its strength, with 1,200 casualties, but it had no reserves coming to continue the fight.

In a similar mission today, this would not be an issue at all. Not even taking precision fire munitions into account, we would have dispatched several SpecOPS teams under cover of darkness with night-vision capability to eliminate many of these threats. Add in the precision munitions of today and it was a suicide mission, for the Nazis.

The sad thing is, given the circumstances and situation, you probably couldn't even find 2400 people to even volunteer for this mission today. Men are not quite what they used to be, that's for damn sure.

Even in 1944, the key to effective defense was mobile shock forces (armor), not fixed emplacements. Rommel was an expert at that, and the Wehrmacht was easily the best at it. As is mentioned, Hitler held back Rommel for fear of commiting the armor at the wrong point, but if the chains had been loosed earlier, the landing would have been a failure (it almost was anyway). Read "Panzer Battles" by Maj Gen F.W. Von Mellenthin for some great insight into WWII armored warfare.