Reply #103: I visited all the beaches when I was 9. [View All]

Sword, Juno and Gold were very flat, and backed up to little towns, making the fight for the beach very brief and the fight for the towns behind more important. This meant that the time period in which there was a shooting gallery on the open beach was quite small.

Omaha was completely different. Huge cliffs, with the German bunkers and even the barbed wire still on top, astride giant bomb craters 15 feet deep. I gotta figure that at least some of those hit the bunkers, but they were still intact. The Germans had a high vantage point and were heavily entrenched, which was not possible on the British and Canadian beaches where everything was flat and the German line of sight was obscured by buildings.

Utah beach was extremely flat and wide, and had the potential to be very bloody. I read in The Longest Day that the Americans there were saved because they landed 250-500 yards from the intended LZ, where by coincidence defenses were much lighter than where the Americans had planned to land. When they broke through the weaker German defenses, they had outflanked the main German garrison on the beach. Interestingly, the invasion force on Utah was lead by one of Teddy Roosevelt's grandsons.