In the wake of the fierce resistance encountered during the landings in the Omaha Assault Area, Real Admiral Hall blamed much of the difficulties and bloodshed on a lack of bombardment ships and a much too brief time to conduct the bombardment—not to mention the failure of the air bombardment. But Hall failed to mention other key failures with more direct impacts.

This installment establishes that Hall’s pre-H-Hour bombardment was only partially executed, with his bombardment ships firing just half of the ammunition they should have. His smaller gunfire support craft had similarly poor expenditure rates. The bombardment was further hampered by poor synchronization with the landing of the leading waves, poor deconfliction of ship positions and gun-target lines, and poor positioning of ships relative to the configuration of their targets.

As executed, the bombardment fell far short of its potential effect on the defenders, and contributed to the casualties among the assault troops. While the destroyers were rightly celebrated for coming to the aid of the troops pinned down on the beach later that day, the unfortunate fact is they they were also partly responsible for that deadly situation by failing to aggressively prosecute their pre-H-Hour bombardment tasks.

After much concern and many complaints about his perceived lack of naval bombardment assets, Admiral Hall (commanding the Omaha Assault Force) developed a detailed bombardment plan to make the best of what he had to work with. Published and refined in the weeks before D-Day, the plan sought to employ his limited assets in the most effective ways possible, going so far as to incorporate strategic heavy bombers and a variety of smaller, less conventional fire support assets.

This instalment examines that plan with an eye to determining how well those assets were allocated and the adequacy of the coordination and guidance contained in that order. This analysis calls into question the effectiveness of much of the plan, which left a substantial percentage of guns idle or assigned to non-essential targets during the preparatory bombardment. The plan also included factors that limited the effectiveness of the fires on the primary bombardment tasks.

Follow me on a deep dive into some of the actual factors that resulted in the failure of the Omaha bombardment mission.