[QUOTE="jaydough"][QUOTE="jaydough"]Well, the whole d-day seen was making a mountain into an anthill. Only one guy was torn in half, nobody got their jaws bashied into their brains and it took 4-6 hours to get up to the darn people. Also nobody could run with their sand and mud filled backpacks. And the water and sand from the beach jammed almost everyone's rifle.DigitalExile
Whoa my grammar sucked then. Friggin' incoherent. Regardless, you said then what I was going to say now, that the events were exaggerated. Of course there were explosions, and machinegun fire, but it wasn't as action packed as the movie would have you believe. If any one of the people in this thread has seen footage you'd see that, except for when there were machine guns firing, the scene looked almost calm. Allies were busy hiding in holes for 6 hours, and German machine guns would have melted with all the firing they did (if we're to believe they did 6 hours of what was shown in the movie).At it's most action packed perhaps the movie would come close, but it wasn't a 15 minute operation. They landed in the early morning and sat there in the dark and cold under sporadic (right word?) machine gun fire for hours becfore they finally took the beach.
Note: I don;t know exact numbers, so "6 hours" could be way off. My point still stands though.
Double note: footage I've seen may not be from the first landing.
Film footage that people always see in documentaries weren't of the first couple hours, but the later waves. There was a reason for this and that's most didn't want to be in the initial landings. A few war photographers like Capa volunteered to be in the initial waves since their equipment wasn't as bulky which would allow them to move faster into cover than a film cameraman could.
Film didn't show how long it took to take the bluffs overlooking Omaha but then the film may have been condensed at that sequence. The Landing and the attack on the defensive position on the bluffs and beyond took pretty much most of the day and the following. The breakthrough created by Miller and his group was creative license to show just how other units made their own breakthroughs in the other sectors on Omaha Beach. Two films which had D-Day Landing sequence at Omaha beach which better showed this are The Longest Day and The Big Red One. Spielberg's film just upped the realism of the combat situation and how it wasn't as antiseptic and clean a battle as past WW2 films have shown them to be.
MG36 and MG42 machine guns used by the German defenders at Omaha wouldn't have melted even with the constant firing. This is fact since Germans designed both guns to have their barrels replaced quite easily between firings to keep them from overheating. Plus, the machine guns wouldn't have been used until the landing force were at a certain point on the beach to maximize it's killing capacity. Those landing crafts which were hit by machine gun fire most likely at a stretch of Omaha near Point-du-Hoc where the distance between surf and bluffs were not as far as other sections of Omaha Beach.
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