About D-Day Landings and Bunkers

by Jinglemisk

Hello. This question was probably answered a thousand and one times but my question still stands and I couldnt find enough photographic evidence to reach a definite solution.

So I have concluded that the D-Day Omaha depiction in Saving Private Ryan is false because

  1. There were no towering giant bunkers in Dog Green sector. What I found out is that the two bunkers were facing with a 45 degree angle inward, and the path leading out of the beach and inland was actually fired upon in enfilade by these two bunkers since they faced inward.

  2. The beach was quite longer due to lowtide. Also the seawall wasn't a sand elevation but indeed a concrete-wooden wall.

So my unanswered questions are the following:

  1. If the bunkers faced inward and fired on the path inland in enfilade, does that mean they didn't have the angle to fire upon the Higgins boats the moment they hit the beach? Given the 45 degree angle inward, it seems unlikely that they could turn the MGs outward enough to fire upon boats 300 yards away.

  2. How could soldiers possibly reach inland if two bunkers faced inward and fired upon the one single path out. It would have been a super messy crossfire. In Saving Private Ryan defilade occurs beyond the seawall so they can storm inland with some covering fire but with two bunkers enfilade crossfire upon the way out I just cannot grasp how they managed to survive.

Rittermeister

While I agree that there are some serious problems with SPR's depiction of the Vierville Draw, I don't think you quite understand the situation either.

This is a map of Dog One/the Vierville Draw's defenses. Notice there are three separate strongpoints, marked WN71, WN72, and WN73. Only WN72 was located directly in front of the draw itself. WN72 consisted of two gun bunkers, one mounting an 8.8cm PAK43 and the other a 5cm PAK38, and a Renault tank turret, arranged to fire up and down the beach, and at least two smaller supporting machine gun positions. WN71 and WN73 were located on the bluffs to either side of the draw, facing out to sea, and contained machine guns, mortars, and light anti-tank guns mounted in small "Tobruk" bunkers. These AT guns proved the greatest danger to lightly armored landing craft; one shell was more than capable of turning a boat into a heap of gore-choked metal.

As far as how the Vierville Draw was taken? The movie got that completely wrong. After the first wave, consisting of A Company, 116th Infantry, was all but wiped out trying to take the draw directly, following waves (including the 2nd Rangers) went over the bluffs to the west and east of the draw and attacked the German bunker complexes from the rear.

llordlloyd
  1. The bunkers in question were part of a bunker complex: while the other bunkers in the complex would provide for firing on landing boats and in enfilade up the beaches, these were sited to prevent attack on the complex from the rear. The Germans knew paratroopers or soldiers successfully landing elsewhere might slip past the front-line bunkers, so the complexes were self-supporting 'islands' intended to hold out even if bypassed.

The bunkers on the beach were just to make things difficult until armoured forces arrived to drive the Allies back into the sea. On many beaches bunkers that couldn't be attacked from the seaward side proved a difficult obstacle, often taking hours to defeat and in doing so distracting forces that should have been pushing toward inland objectives or linking the beaches together.

  1. Indeed it would have been a messy crossfire, and soldiers would not have obligingly walked into it to be killed. Like troops anywhere facing a strong point, men employed supressive fire and if available heavy weapons to at least temporarily subdue the defences. Smoke and dust would also have helped.

I recommend the Osprey books on Omaha Beach in the Campaign series, and the eponymous title in the Battleground Europe series for a soldier's-eye view of the battle.