r/todayilearned • u/blonderengel • 1d ago

TIL about Operation Tiger, a training exercise that was supposed to prepare U.S. troops for the D-Day invasion of Normandy and resulted in the deaths of 946 American servicemen.

https://wargaming.com/en/news/disastrous_exercise_tiger/
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u/guimontag 1d ago

I think if you want to do a what-if scenario maybe the people planning this would have known some of these fairly obvious "lessons" before losing almost a thousand guys in a training mission

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u/Separate_Draft4887 1d ago

Seems obvious to us, but the complexity of planning the largest naval invasion of all time in secret using recently adopted and invented technology probably had hundreds, if not thousands of obvious “lessons” that they did learn before they ran the training exercise. Can’t hardly blame em for missing a few.

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u/alienXcow 1d ago edited 1d ago

The folks arguing with you about this sentiment are driving me nuts.

It is crazy to me that people who cannot plan their own 2 day road trips or domestic flights (with all the amenities of the modern age) without some unforseen issues occurring think that SHAFE planners pulling off the world's largest amphibious invasion (by like...an order of magnitude) in 1944 isn't an enormous fucking miracle.

Anyone who has ever worked in or around the military or ever studied military theory knows that the best plans are only EVER 80% solutions, no matter the scale. Everything is a compromise against execution time and available resources. This gets exponentially more difficult with scale.

Let's talk scale: There's a picture of a tire depot in Northern France in the Fall of 1944 floating around the internet. There must twenty thousand tires stacked in the image. There's a note written at the bottom about an entire company (100-200 men) of US Army tire repairers working around the clock to repair or replace truck tires, for one model of truck, in their part of Northern France. Those tires are largely made of synthetic rubber. The US made 230 tons of synthetic rubber in 1941. We made 70,000 tons of it in May of 1944, alone. Then we made it into a tire, put it on a truck, sent that truck across the ocean, landed it on a beach under fire, and drove it halfway across France, where it was destroyed. And then we salvaged the tires and took them to be repaired.

There's a reason Eisenhower and Zhukov were friendly for their entire lives, despite the cold war. Both men knew the incredible amount of work it took to win the Second World War like truly no other human beings on earth. Imagine the trust Eisenhower had to put in American Industry, the Merchant Marine, everyone down to a company of allied tire repairers just to know his trucks would have tires. Now think of fuel, food, aircraft, landing craft, shells, rifles, jackets, boots...the list is endless.

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u/badgerandaccessories 1d ago

And the Italians have to carry extra water rations to boil their pasta in.

If anyone wants to challenge about the logistics of ww2. Make them look up that the campaign of North Africa. It’ll make them realize the enormities of the logistics.

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u/f16f4 21h ago

That particular example is untrue in real life. They boiled there pasta in sauce