When they did Gold Beach it was comparatively poorly defended (December 1943) but the Ver-sur-Mer lighthouse was in operation and they had to keep throwing themselves down onto the beach when the beam went over them. At Omaha as they swam ashore they got caught in the beam of a sentry's torch but they were in the surf and were able to slowly inch back out as the tide came in. The sentry didn't come to investigate - suspicion is he was prevented from doing so by barbed wire.

A friend of mine's grandfather (or similar relation) was a commando on one of these raids in Normandy in 1942. He was killed on the operation and is buried with another commando by the sea in France. Can't give any more detail than that unfortunately but it was hugely interesting to hear from them.

OK here's the information. Operation Aquatint. Private Richard Leonard

One of them left a tool behind by mistake. A local Frenchman used to walk on the beach at low tide and spotted it. He knew what it was and what it meant. He managed to pick it up and hide it. It would have been a death sentence if he'd been caught. A very brave man. D-Day was only successful because of the many personal acts of bravery.

All I can say is “Big Balls”.

for an pretty stupid cause... which only exchanged nazi tyranny over most of europe for soviet tyranny over most of europe..

You have a better idea i assume?

​@@RK-cj4oc Stupendous does not mean stupid. KZfaq

A monumental logistics task undertaken and triumphed over. Can the command staff ever get enough praise for this??

The History Guy made an excellent video of the Nevada on DDay.

That is a legendary battleship. Just like HMS Warspite. Should have been preserved for the nation.

Must have been a very useful mobile artillery unit in effect!

Absolutely, she's not all gone, some of her keel can still be scuba dived off Cornwall.

I totally agree. Greatest battleship ever made by any power. From Jutland to Narvik, Calabria to Matapan, no other came close. We should have preserved CV6 Enterprise as well. So sad that we both did not.

@@goodshipkaraboudjan yes have always thought same,if I could magically bring them back I would choose -hood,warspite,Rodney and praps king George ,think it’s disgraceful that biggest navy in world at that time could not save even one battleship,

@@alanhare8566 The UK was broke. Providing food, power, and medical care for the population was more important.

@@davidforbes7772 Ironically they created more jobs when Warspite became the largest ever salvage operation on the British Isles.

Belfast and Diadem saved many Canadian lives that day on Juno beach.

I never knew about this, what was the reason? Did the Allies have better equipment/meteorologists or was there a geographic advantage or something else?

The allies had won the battle of the Atlantic, so there were few German observations. And the allies had hundreds of ships and aircraft crossing the Atlantic, so lots of weather data. I've a meteorological background myself, and I've said in the past that Overlord was a battle won the the weathermen.

​​@@adamdickinson2894Geographic advantage: the clouds always move from the Atlantic to Europe. The Americans could see the clouds when they started!!!!! But the Germans (using U boots) managed to implant an unmanned meteorological station in Greenland running on lead acid batteries and a radio link to Germany. The equipment was recovered in recent years. Ingenious for the time!

It wA Weather station Kurt in Lsbrador see also North Atlantic weather war

tHE bRITS AS MARINE eMPIR SND TRADING naton and marine insurabce cenntre had fof sailing purposes the best mdtdlrolgy, lighiships lighthouses, coasgard lifeboat and maitime laaw ubnil maybe 1900? USA then took over beczse jt's industrial andd oi infrastuct around the gf was so vulale to hutticane. Post WWS2 computng has dominagfd the subfcdt abnd . . . gps sorfrfy. parkinsonm's

Wow, that is one very special grandfather

That's June 5, not May 6 for all you curious Yanks.

She may look small by comparison, but we know the Iowa casts a damned big shadow. That grand lady knows she doesn't have to try and impress, the actions of her and her crew will always be sufficient.

I'm glad to hear your dad's mate kept his humanity that day. However I also think he should probably have been court marshalled. It's hard to tell from the few details given but assuming that our guy (your dad's mate) had gone forward to be a naval Forward Observation Officer to call in naval gunnery on targets further inland towards Caen then that was his duty. Nothing else. They would have had orders regarding French civilian casualties. Just as they had to uninjured cvilians and separately to those presenting as local authority or resistance. At the very least the Hague conventions governing the duties if an occupying power would have applied. The little girl and all the other terrified and injured people were a job for the local authorities, the mairie. I'm sure the orders would be no delays. Reach the objectives then halt until further orders. Every mother's son slogging his way up to Caen would have needed our guy to focus on the job in hand. Seems like the strains of the day got to him. Kind of losing it. Not sound judgement to return to the beach and make a thing of evacuation rather than seek medical expertise locally. They had more doctors per casualty than the army did. More nurses. A whole population of volunteers. People that spoke her language knew her parents ettc.

USS Texas is still afloat today! Long live Texas BB 35

This was not that unusual a practice

Utah beach had a very sparse presence of low quality (static garrison divisions and OST battalions) German troops and very few bunkers. The only "real" infantry German division in Normandy was the 352nd (trained to join the East front, but still in France), at Omaha. And the results clearly showed this!

​@@marcobassini3576 352nd? They were the chaps that 47 Commando Royal Marines attacked on 7th June, at odds of 1-4,. They captured Port en Bessin, linking Gold and Omaha.

@@adventussaxonum448 Wikipedia says that the surviving (to naval bombardments) garrison of the battery was 120 men, half of those over 40 years old, that surrendered "with minimal resistance” when encircled from inland. Logical, given the fact that the battery has steep cliffs seaside, but flat open terrain landside, and that the garrison had probably only rifles and barbed wire to defend.

@@marcobassini3576 Wikipedia 🤣

Crewed in part by Combined Operations Pilotage Parties (COPP), the same unit that had landed go take the soil samples.

No invasion in the Pacific came close to the size or number of ships involved during the landings in Normandy. The largest invasion in the Pacific during the war was at Okinawa in April 1945.

It was Monty not Ike

The ones launched at the right distance actually worked pretty well.

74% landed on US beaches, 83% on Brit/Can beaches. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/aNSRlaag1ce6oo0.html

I suppose the RN landing craft crews had the advantage of having a tradition of no Captain can go far wrong if he lays his ship alongside one of the enemy, and similar aggressive thinking. So they knew what was expected of them and that near rabid aggression would not bring censure down on them.

"losing a majority of the swimming tanks" Source ?

@@nickdanger3802 27 out of 32 according to IWM video The reason Germany failed on D-Day.

@jollyjohnthepirate3168 she's also under going an overhaul right now. I love our battleship.

Canadians helped by learning lessons the hard way at Dieppe.

Delusional,

@@Cravatron The Chiefs of naval, air and ground operations were Ramsay, Tedder and Montgomery.

If it wasn't for the British appeasing Hitler, the war would have never happened.

I would hope so. You guys have been 70 miles away from them for a thousand years, with experience in cross channel invasions both ways. Why wouldn’t we defer to your advice in such a situation?

I think King was fine just being the host but that photo op for sure would have looked great for any postwar election.

Are you from The Netherlands, very good servicemen indeed.

@@davidgray3321 Yes, I am. I know about these boats, because I red the books of the Dutch author K. Norel in my youth (young people don't do that anymore). If I'm not mistaken, he interviewed the people who were actually there and he created stories based on their accounts, but with fictional characters acting in these events.

What about it? That may sound harsh, but this is a roughly fifteen minute video about the naval operation around the D-day landings. So much to talk about and so little time. Those commando's, just like the paratroopers (who did get a little mention) have performed incredible feats of daring and are more than deserving of their own video's.

Actually it was very much in doubt, Ike has a speach written out for the operation failing where he took responsiblity for it and resigned. It was found by his orderly when he was cleaning his uniform.

'Utter defeat of Empire forces in Asia?' Read about XIV Army and the defeat of the U-Go Offensive. Then read about the Bengal Famine, but the facts, not the revisionist myth. The Bengal Famine had a number of causes, among which were the number of refugees from Japanese held areas, the inability to import food from those same areas, stockpiling by hoarders and, perhaps worst of all, the Bengal administration, which tried to minimise the crisis. The worst that could be said of Churchill was that he should have known what was taking place, but didn't. After all, in 1943, he had little else to worry about. You could also add the refusal of FDR to allow the transfer of merchant shipping, by the way. What is without dispute, except by those who choose to blame Churchill for everything since the Black Death, is that once he did find out, he transferred food distribution to the British Indian Army, and had grain convoys diverted from Australia to India. I appreciate, of course, that revisionists won't accept any of this, as it doesn't suit the agenda. It is, however, factually accurate.

Not correct old boy, go and read up on the Burma campaign and the Chindits, the British wrote the book on jungle warfare, it’s a shame the USA didn’t use what the Chindits learned in Vietnam. All the best.

I mean not correct re the “utter defeat” comment, drivel.

For sure the sailors of those battleships (as well as the allied high commands) have feared a lot the cannons of the German coastal batteries. Those cannons were in reinforced concrete casemates that for sure could not be disabled as easily as a battleship! And if fact on D-Day they opened fire both on allied ships and on Omaha and Juno beaches (with enfilade fire).

@@marcobassini3576 Going back to the age of sail, fortresses always have had a firepower advantage against ships bearing the same number of guns. Thicker protection, and a stable shooting platform rather than one that is rocking and bobbing about!

Not all of us.

@@Ronritdds Good to hear my friend.

I’m British and I couldn’t disagree more! Most of the US and British population is ignorant of what actually happened in WW2. Anyone with any historical interest or education knows how much of an allied effort this was

Overlord (not Sword Beach or Gold Beach) is a 1975 black-and-white British war film written and directed by Stuart Cooper. Set during the Second World War, around the D-Day invasion (Operation Overlord), the film is about a young British soldier's experiences and his meditations on being part of the war machinery, including his premonitions of death.

@@nickdanger3802 I'll have a look for that, thank you for the tip.

Or they would have been destroyed by Naval gunfire like Anzio.

​@@benwilson6145Anzio was a fiasco for the Americans. When they landed on the beach the total German presence in the area was 100 men. And yet the Americans were not able to move out of the beach for many MONTHS. The Germans quickly organized an improvised force gathering units as far as north Italy (1000 km away), and were very close to throw the Americans back to the sea. Imagine if they had a few panzer divisions ready just inland, as it was Rommel's plan for Normandy.

Still an excellent video.

Or the USS Texas flooding half of the ship to increase the range of her main guns.

True enough. One of Hitler's biggest mistakes was declaring war on Russia. He didn't realize the immense industrial potential the US would unleash against the Axis, simultaneously protecting Britain, arming Russia and driving back the Japanese.

Nobody forgets the Soviet (more than just Russian!) side and their sacrifices. In fact D-Day was in part an effort to support the Soviets by drawing Nazi resources away from the eastern front. The Allies were also sacrificing many mariners' lives and much materiel supplying the Soviet Union with lend-lease via the arctic convoys.

Please try this line with a Black US veteran.

Perhaps bc this video was about the naval side of the landling, not the air or the troops aspects (they are in 2 videos to come). Pls pay attention…

No. It's mentioned on the Omaha segment.

Clue is in the title …’naval operations’🤷‍♂️

well done. you must be very proud. instead of doing what you did, i decided to watch the video...

👌🏆🆗 🏅🥇