Anybody heard of Jack Churchill? Total Badass!

@SuperbattleshipYamato Yeah I get you 100%. Alternate History is a niche interest in the first place so finding other people willing to go down the rabbit hole is always tough.

@Coldwarrior1984

Reading this, I feel strongly you’re confused about the nature of the German defenses in Normandy. In combination, I feel you are overestimating the Allies ability to place smoke as precisely and in the quantity that would have been required to have a chance to accomplish the goal you lay out. I also feel you’re overestimating the effectiveness of smoke even if I grant that none of the above was an issue.

I’ve been to Normandy three times with tour guides. I’ve read everything from Ambrose and Osprey on Overlord. I’m tempted to repeat my initial post about why you don’t hear or see this tactic being performed en masse in the many assaults in the Pacific or Mediterranean.

I’ll just sum this up and say that the German fighting positions were not composed primarily of Saving Private Ryan style bunkers but widerstandsnest with Tobruks across so much acreage that a simultaneous precision smoke affect against all of them for the required time to get everyone ashore is less realistic that just a mass smoke bombardment of the beach area.

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@Witt

Thank you so much! I appreciate your input.

Bismarck

I was looking at a collection of Winston Churchill’s speeches and the following paragraph (from a speech given on November 12, 1939) caught my eye as being one of his less successful blends of assessments and prediction about the course of the war:

“A long succession of important events has moved in our favour since the beginning of the war.  Italy, which we had feared would be drawn from her historic partnership with Britain and France in the Mediterranean – a partnership which will become increasingly fruitful – has adopted a wise policy of peace.  No quarrel has developed between us and Japan.  […]  The Russian Soviet Government, embodied in the formidable figure of Stalin, has barred off once and for ever all Nazi dreams of an advance in the east.  […]  Nazi Germany is barred off from the east, and has to conquer the British Empire and the French Republic or perish in the attempt.”

Other than the part about having to conquer Britain, this paragraph ended up being invalidated piece by piece by the events of June 1940, June 1941 and December 1941.  Oddly enough for someone who loved to make bold and confident assertions about future events, later on in the same speech Churchill cautiously states that he “shall not attempt to prophesy” whether Hitler would eventually invade Holland and Belgium – which Hitler did in fact do just a few months later.

This kind of reminds me of how no one remembers that Americans revolution wasn’t -exactly- fought against the British, but infact, many German Mercenary units…

IE The Headless Horsemen was a Hessian Mercenary!