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

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If I can get them to stop firing for a few seconds that can save lives. I’ll waste ammo if it means suppressing machine guns. That would be my mindset.

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I guess. The chances of hitting an MG in a bunker 50 above you are probably slim, though. I'd hate to survive the trip off the beach then be black on ammo.

I can't even imagine being in that situation. I imagine most of the guys there were so paralyzed with fear that their training has to involuntarily take over. I don't think there would be a lot of rational thinking going on in my head.

Why laugh?

Because firing a shot here and there while you're running doesn't do anything to suppress fire on Normandy beach on 6/6/44

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It was pretty stupid that the front of the boat opened up like that instead of the sides of the boat

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It's designed that way on purpose. The soldiers had so much weight they couldn't swim, and the boats were designed to drop off as many troops as possible to quickly overwhelm the enemy.

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

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shite my pants and die, or die then shite my pants.

Interesting question, but its like being thrown head first into a wood chipper.

Hats off to all WWII Vets , yall were made of tough stuff. I have a feeling if the current college group right now were to have fought that war we might be speaking German today.

For starters, nobody knows what they'd do in a situation like that. There's some people out there that are the best guys in the world running field ops on some base in the US, but when they're not paper targets and live humans shooting back at them they freeze up. There's some people who suck at running field ops but when shite hits the fan, they're great. People are funny like that.

Me personally, I would just hope to God that I would do my duty the best I could. If it's my time to die then so be it, at least if I died I would've known that I died doing my job and not letting anybody else down.

Except I think Patton said it best when it comes to war, "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his country."

Right

We know what the invasion looked like from movies, so maybe we think we know what we would ave done. they had no idea what waited for them on that beach and whether you lived or died was simply blind luck

That being said, Tom hanks showed how to survive that morning, get to the beach in one piece, regroup under cover and move as fast as you can towards the sea grass and the bluffs

I would have brought a shield with me for the invasion. The Nazi bullets would bounce off of the shield until I got within hand grenade range. Then I kill the Nazis with my hand grenades.

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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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Before that gate dropped, I would plan on doing exactly as I had been trained to do over the previous 6 to 12 months. The reason for all of the repetitive training is so you can immediately react as trained, even when chaos reigns.

If an artillary round lands in the LCVP, I can't do much about that. If a MG 42 is shooting straight down the length of the boat (at ~1,200 rounds per minute), maybe I get over the side if I have a chance to react fast enough. You need to stay alive in order to improvise. adapt, and overcome.