June 6th was a fiasco by some measures. None of the primary day-1 objectives were achieved. The prep bombardment wasn’t on target. The fortifications were stronger than expected. 27 of 29 specially designed western tanks of the 741st tank battalion were lost before even reaching the primary contact line.
The infantry assault got scattered, ending up with an unplanned 900m gap between units preventing them from mutually supporting each other. Only 5 of 16 of the engineer teams made it to their assigned starting points. These engineer units suffered 40% casualties. June 6th losses for this small section of front are estimated at 5,000 — 6,000 killed, wounded, and missing versus only 1,200 for the enemy. Day 1 objectives wouldn’t be fully accomplished until June 9th.
But over at Utah beach, even though the landing zones were shifted the Americans only had 197 casualties. The picture one paints of an offensive varies greatly depending upon what is focused on. And the success of an offensive can rarely be judged early on. It wasn’t until July 25th with the launch of Operation Cobra that the Americans would succeed with a breakout and eventually collapse the German troops in the area of operations.
If we judged the entire Normandy landings and the Allied operations in Europe by what happened on Omaha beach on June 6th, we would be in the wrong. There are some panicking over seeing some Ukrainian vehicles getting bunched up and being focus fired upon by Russian artillery. Just like Omaha wasn’t the entire story of Normandy, a bunching up of some vehicles isn’t the whole story for Ukraine.
There is no guarantee for Ukrainian success. It will be a hard fight for them with setbacks. That doesn’t damper my enthusiasm for their chances overall. I’m still confident they can achieve a breakout and collapse part of the Russian lines. To do that, they have to reach the main Russian line first before breaching it. At the moment, we are simply at the point of the Ukrainians making their way through the outer defenses. That is not something to do in too much of a rush.
We also haven’t heard much regarding anything North of Bakhmut. Is nothing going on up there, or simply not much being reported on from there? I’ve heard mostly good gains so far from the southern areas, certainly far better than any Russian offense since March of 2022. The Ukrainians have a tough fight ahead of them, but they got this. Don’t fall for misleading narratives full of incomplete information.