D-Day! The invasion's on! A flotilla of LC!'s (Landing Craft, Infantry) drives across the English Channel to open the invasion of Western Europe. Overhead fly barrage balloons, as protection against strafing by enemy aircraft.This photograph was the first invasion picture radioed by the US Signal Corps. Above, Gls clutter the decks of LCls heading for the shores of France.
Months of invasion practice aboard US Coast Guard- and Navy-manned landing craft preceded the historic blow against the German defenses on the French Coast . At right, troops board LC/Ls (Landing Craft Infantry, Large) for fina l in vasion maneuvers. At far right, crewmen of the ba11leship USS Nevada listen as an officer reads a message to all hands on D-Day in the English Channel.
the beaches between the low and high water mark be strewn with obstacles, all capped with contact mines and laced with barbed wire. Invisible at high tide , these obstacles would impale landing craft , making them easy prey to the aitillery strong points and machine gunners on the bluffs. To deal with the invaders that might still reach the sea wall , the coast roads wh ich paralleled the wall s were lined with more bai路bed wire and the grassy sand between the beach roads and the sloping bluffs was heav ily mined. Beyond these entrapments, the few natw-al ravines wh ich led off the beaches were guai路ded by more gun emplacements, and the villages above were also f01tified . Low lying ai路eas were flooded by the damming of rivers to create endless marshes which would bog down the troops and prevent the passage of tanks and other SEA HISTORY 69, SPRING l 994
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vehicles. The few dry causeways which led from the beaches inland were again protected by st:rongpoints. As aerial reconn aissance and information from the French underground reached Allied planners , countermeasures were developed for the fo rmidable array of defen ses awaiting the Allied troops . Although it was fe lt that the coastal defe nses could be "softened " by naval and aeri al bombardment, the beach obstacles proved a tougher nut to crack. On a secluded stretch of the Florida Gulf coast, the tetrahedrons , sloping beams and "Belgian Gates" were recreated and bombed , bl asted , and rammed by reinforced landing craft- all to no avail-the open structure of these obstacles made them almost immune to blast damage. So a radi cal depaiture from traditional militai路y doctrine was ca ll ed for.
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To prevent the landing craft from be ing hung up or sunk by obstacles they could not see at hi gh water, it was decided that the invasion should take place on a ri sing low tide when the obstacles would be visible on the broad exposed beach. Engineers could then be sent in with the assault troops to manu all y clear safe corridors through the obstacles with explosives and bulldozers so that followup waves coming in on the flood tide could di sembark their troops higher up on the beach. Of course this meant that the first-wave troops and the engineers would be totally exposed on the broad sands. To give them the close-in artillery support they would need , the British developed an amphibious version of the 33-ton Sherman tank , fitted with vulcani zed canvas flotation collars and propellers. These Duplex Drive (DD)
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