d-day odds

[dannyday5821]

heres a crazy question, has anyone actually calculated the odds of survival that those men had when they landed for the d-day invasions? ya know, the actual mathamatical odds - im just curious.

ive been watching clips of d-day landings...wow...i mean, i watch them, and its almost hard to believe it ever happened...i just hope its never forgotten, mainly for all those people that died...madness...

[jno]

I don't think you could literally calculate the odds - it would depend on knowing each German soldier and how straight he shot, for instance. But yes, it was high-risk; but it had to be done; the Germans had to be driven back and it had to start somewhere.

[heathfield]

You could work out the approximate odds for yourself from the figures given here.

But as the site points out, there are no exact numbers, as full records often weren't kept at the time, or those reported to be 'missing in action' ,etc, could have just lost their way and turned up later.

Still, a rough figure shouldn't be too hard to work out.

[123everton]

All commanders when planning an operation will do an equasion on the estimated rate of atrrition based on the inteligence that they have garnered via reconaissonce etc. There will be a figure somewhere that will give a foreseen casualty rate, it would've been neccessary in order to work out the amount of attackers, the deployment of munitions and the correct amount of reserves, correctly positioned whilst being able to reinforce success and identify failure.
The most notable thing of all the anecdotal war literature is just how much space there is either side of a bullet.

[vehelpfulguy]

You have to remember that there were a number of different landing areas, some were worse than others.

Beaches were:
Omaha and Utah (US armies)
Gold and Sword (mainly UK armies)
Juno (mainly Canadian armies)

The worst beach was Omaha, this was the one featured in saving Private Ryan. 2,400 men were killed.

But at Utah out of 23,000 men who landed about 210 were killed.

Juno lost 1,200 troops, Sword was 630 and Gold was 400.

But remember that about 132,000 troops landed on the 5 beaches so you are talking about huge numbers.

Statistically I think those in the first wave had the worst odds because they had to take the beach from scratch and of course spent longer on the beach than anyone else.

[vehelpfulguy]

As jno says, it had to start somewhere.

The Germans had been in France since 1940 and Hitler had been expecting an attack for a long time (and the allies had been planning an attack for a long time).

Hitler decided to build his Atlantic wall all along the Northern coast of France, and even through Holland, Belgium etc.

He chose Rommel to be in charge of building this "wall" and they spent a huge amount of money laying mines, laying barbed wire, building tank traps, building concrete gun emplacments and so on.

Anywhere the allies landed they would have met huge resistance and there would have been much loss of life.

The decision of where to land was given much debate, with some favouring the shorter crossing to Calias, but it was even better fortified than Normandy.

But even after they had taken the beaches at Normandy it took them months to fight there way inland, through the bocage, the dense hedgerow country of Normandy.

After the slaughter on the beaches many more men were killed fighting there way out of Normandy.

[Cassiopier]

I very much doubt it Danny, chances are that those that planned it probably didn't care all that much as long as the end justified the means, the fore runner of the d.day landings was Gallipoli, read up on that you will see what I mean.

Cassie