Use of AT guns and Smoke on D-Day

Every piece of D-Day media i see involves scores of men, scores of casualties and many many, machine guns... Seems kind of WW1-ish...
Now call me crazy but I recall that the Germans had a piece of technology called the AT gun, and that the Allies had smoke shells and smoke grenades... To me these seem like two technologies which could have decided the battle, but I don't know much upon the subject? Were they even used on D-Day?

AT Guns:
If the Germans were able to conceal machine guns and pillboxes from Allied costal fire, surely concealing even a few AT guns would have been just as easy... Wouldn't having a few Pak-40's facing seaward have been extremely effective in knocking out landing craft and floating tanks before they even arrived? Was this attempted on any beach at all, and if so was it effective?

Smoke:
For the Allies wouldnt it have made sense to bombard the shore with smoke shells and/or smoke grenades? This would have allowed the Allied soldiers to advance without half as many casualties as the Germans MG positions could not see them... Granted perhaps the Allies were not expecting such resistance at Omaha, but it seems a small precaution to take... Was smoke used aggressively on D-Day? Was it too windy, or was it simply not used...

 

AT guns were deployed on the beaches.

However you have to remember that these are fixed guns needing to cover the entire French and Belgian coasts as the invastion could come at any time or at any point.

Just to stick a single Pak 40 every 500 yards along this coast line with a crew and stack of 30 assorted shells would require a huge commitment of resouces which Germany just couldn't afford due to fighting in Russia and Italy. It is for this reason that coastal infantry units were also of lower caliber than the norm.

I am aware that tanks were taken out on the beaches on D Day by AT fire and no doubt a lot landing craft were also damaged and destroyed either in the water or on the beach.

But again the allies had a near limitless number of landing craft (anyone know the exact or rough numbers deployed on the day?) and ammo and skill was limited so the overall affect was negligable to opperation taken as a whole.

FNG

 

ooops forgot about smoke.

Remember smoke works both ways in that everyone suffers.

The allies had limitless and overpowering off table support and as such the ability to direct this fire accuratly from the off shore fire platforms and air and also from the beech observers probably meant that a decision was made not to deploy smoke in any great volume.

This would allow the allies to accuratly target the limited fixed defences with huge limitless off table fire power whilst the limited fixed defences attacks on the unprotected troops would but limited and negligable to overall opperation when taken as a whole.

Of course that was the plan and the plan sank on first contact and it is off little help to the grunt in the hole on the beach that smoke was not dropped in great volume because the generals want to watch from the ships to see what is happening.

FNG

 

However, the intensity of the fighting--i.e. at Omaha--created enough smoke at some places such as Les Moulins, so as to make the allied advance easier there due to the smokescreen. :smok:

 

According to "D-Day" by Stephen Ambrose, the numbers were:

229 LSTs carrying 1089 LCVPs
245 LCIs
911 LCTs
481 LCMs

That's 2955 transport ships total.

 

Anybody know over what distance they were deployed? Or how many landing craft landed per wave, over what time frame?

I'm sure they didnt all arrive at once

 

IIRC use of smoke was trialled at Dieppe and found to be effctively useless. After all, it requires the wind conditions to be one, constant type, which is impossible, or you would need continual re-laying of the smoke. And if the smoke gets blown off out to sea, you get landing craft colliding. Not good...