Reply To: Continued Explorations of Normandy Wargaming

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My God, I think there is something legitimately wrong with me.  What kind of fool tries to recreate a legitimate, full-scale, platoon-based, historically “approximate” re-staging of ALL of Omaha Beach?

Well, the map is complete.  The initial forces are set up.  Just a few special rules to iron out and it’s time to start this apocalyptic game.

The whole map. Almost six miles wide, over three miles deep. At least 5,000 men on the table already. Each hex is a 4×6 15mm table, or three 28mm tables.

 

A close up of what I’m sure will be the bloodiest sector of a very bloody beach, Dog Green and Dog White, the right shoulder of the Omaha assault zone.

 

THIRTY SECONDS! GOD BE WITH YA! A detail of the initial landing waves of Dog Green and Dog White. Note the “Ranger” counters in Dog Green. This is “C” Company, 2nd Ranger Battalion, “Captain Miller’s” unit in Saving Private Ryan. They went in with “A” Company, 1st Battalion, 116th Regimental Combat Team at the mouth of the Vierville Draw. Well, you’ve seen the movie. The reality was horrifically worse. MOVE FAST, AND CLEAR THOSE MURDER HOLES!

 

German defenses at the mouth of the Vierville draw. Now 726th Rgt was originally a “second rate” unit, part of the 716th Static Infantry Division. But since March they’d been attached to the hardened 352nd, reinforced and re-equipped, and trained largely to 352nd’s standards. Furthermore, elements of 352nd had been moved up to reinforce them (916th Grenadier Rgt, specifically). Still, you’ll notice that many of the German platoons are still the weaker 2-I-2 “Security” platoons rather than the “3-I-2*” Rifle Platoons. Nevertheless, only the fact that the Americans get another whole wave just like this one every other turn for at least eight turns, plus massive destroyer, cruiser, and even battleship gunfire support (USS Texas), plus massive air support, even gives them a sliver of hope.

 

Things might go a little easier in 16th RCT / 1st Infantry Division’s sector over in Easy Green and Easy Red.

 

German defenses are actually extremely brittle. When you make up German units as they actually were, and try to deploy them along a battlefield of the proper scale, you realize how thin they were. True, 352nd Division was reinforced, but they were also expected to defend 33 miles of beach, an absurdly huge frontage for a single division in the field. Here is the limit of their reserves. Couriers on bicycles, empty trucks and horse-drawn wagons, flak troops, and so on. There are some nice regimental 12.0 cm mortars back here, along with the 10.5 cm howitzers of I.Bn/Artillery Regiment 352.