re: What would have been your plan if you were on a Normandy landing boat?

Grandfatger carried a Bangalore onto Omaha. The story i got secondhand is that he dropped his helmet while unloading, stopped to pick it up and held up a few other guys in the process. That little group managed to get behind a stranded tank and move up to the beach. Rest of the boat did not fare as well.

The amount of concrete the Germans poured along the beaches of France was staggering

You have a link to this? I've done multiple projects and papers on WWII and I've never come across this

Just think if it weren't the D squad defending the beach. Pussy arse Russians who surrendered, kids and elderly is what held the beach.

Imagine if it were the German 6th army and 4th panzer division on the bluffs overlooking the beach head instead of some rag tag group of undesirables.

I have so much on WW2 and I just stumbled across Tiger in a random Time life book.

Some books report it as friendly fire, some say Eboats appeared and left undetected. It was a combination of both.

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Exercise Tiger, or Operation Tiger, was the code name for one in a series of large-scale rehearsals for the D-Day invasion of Normandy, which took place in April 1944 on Slapton Sands in Devon. Coordination and communication problems resulted in friendly fire deaths during the exercise, and an Alliedconvoy positioning itself for the landing was attacked by E-boats of Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine, resulting in the deaths of at least 749 American servicemen.[1][2] Because of the impending invasion of Normandy, the incident was under the strictest secrecy at the time and was only nominally reported afterwards.

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The remaining ships and their escort fired back and the E-boats made no more attacks. In total, 749 servicemen (551 United States Army and 198 United States Navy) were killed during Exercise Tiger,[2][14] whereas 197 were killed in the actual Utah Beach landing on 6 June.[15] Many servicemen drowned or died of hypothermia in the cold sea while waiting to be rescued. Many had not been shown how to put on their lifebelt correctly, and placed it around their waist, the only available spot because of their large backpacks. In some cases this meant that when they jumped into the water the weight of their combat packs flipped them upside down, dragging their heads underwater and drowning them.[16]Dale Rodman, who travelled on LST-507, commented: "The worst memory I have is setting off in the lifeboat away from the sinking ship and watching bodies float by." [5]The 248 bodies that were recovered were sent to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey on 29 April.[17]

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Most believe that more deaths were caused by the friendly fire shellings, but clearly not being on the same radio channel as the British allowed for small German coastal boats to destroy some unguarded landing crafts.

Quotes from Wikipedia.

Just Google "operation tiger"
See what you find.

There is definitely a conspiracy of sorts there. Mostly a cover-up of a bad error.

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if I'm in the rear I'm not certain that i would exit.

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Then your boat driver would shoot you for not leaving... Seriously

I thought at the time they are mostly conscripts with the Germans mostly being on the Eastern front.

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During D Day invasion. Front row do you immediately try to dive off to the side when the gate drops? A few rows back do you try to use dead bodies for cover? How would you try to get to the beach and cover?

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There is a bit of a myth when it comes to the Normandy landings. I blame Saving Private Ryan for it. The misunderstanding is that all landing craft were swept with MG42 fire firing straight down into the boat as soon as the ramp came down.

But that's not actually true, at least for the vast majority of the boats at any rate. In fact, the only boats that were hit straight on with fire before their troops could disembark were the ones who had the misfortune to hit the beach directly in front of the German pillboxes and bunkers. Most boats came ashore between the machine gun nests and thus were not subject to head on MG fire but instead took flanking fire from either left, right, or even both sides. Thus most infantrymen were able to safely disembark, albeit only to come under intense fire the moment they left their landing boats.

Don’t die.