I’ve chosen my favorite story from Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day (having had to stop reading partway through and then pick it up again).
At Omaha Beach, the Navy prefaced the invasion with an extensive bombardment of Nazi fortifications along the shore, but then moved their fire to inland targets as Allied infantry began landing. Since the Navy couldn’t possibly tell where Allied troops had already made advances, they relied on forward observers on the beach to radio the positions of specific targets.
The plan failed when many of the forward observers were killed, and those who weren’t found that radios had been dropped or destroyed when coming ashore. This left the Navy out of contact with the infantry, and thus powerless to help the men getting slaughtered on the beach.
Frustrated, Destroyer captains pushed their ships closer and closer to the shore, at great risk of running aground, hoping to find some way of spotting targets on the beach themselves.
Comdr. Robert Beer on Carmick went in to within 900 meters of the beach, where he could keep up a visual communciation of a sort with the troops ashore. When he saw a tank fire a single shot at a certain point on the bluff, Beer blasted the same spot. When he could see riflemen firing at a target, he laid into it with his 5-inch shells.
…
Frankford fired away from shoal water 800 meters off the beach. Gunnery Officer Keeler recalled: “A tank sitting at the water’s edge with a broken track fired at something on the hill. We immediately followed up with a 5-inch salvo. The tank gunner flipped open his hatch, looked around at us, waved, dropped back in the tank, and fired at another target. For the next few minutes he was our fire-control party. Our range-finder optics could examine the spots where his shells hit.
A bit later, McCook had the perhaps unique experience of forcing German troops to surrender. As [Lt. Comdr. Ralph] “Rebel” Ramey was firing at a cliff position, German soldiers appeared waving a white flag and attempting to signal the ship by semaphore and flashing lights. … Ramey had his men signal to the Germans that they should come down the bluff and surrender themselves. They understood and did, coming down single file with hands up to turn themselves over to GIs on the beach.
Overall the naval bombardment was not very extensive (to maintain surprise) and basically ineffective. The aerial bombardment was similarly limited and compounded by the a tactical decision to fly perpendicular to the beach. This limited their exposure to anti-aircraft weapons, but also meant their bombs were as likely to land on the beach as on the Germans. (The alternative was to fly along the beach, making it easier for everyone to hit something — Germans hitting planes, Allies hitting Germans.)
In the end, about 2500 American soldiers died that day. A number close to the number killed in 9/11 attacks. By WWII standards, 2500 was fairly low — even for a single day.
One of the most remarkable historic trends is the dramatic decline in war deaths since WWII. Total deaths in WWII was about 50,000,000, or about 10,000,000 per year, or 30,000 per day, or about 1,000 per hour. But the rate of death increased as the war went on with most of the fatalities in the last year, say 2,000 per hour.
Since then it is almost unheard of for wars to be that deadly to soldiers and civilians. The exceptions — Darfur, for example — are notable because we have retreated from the concept of total war. At least for now.