What if Rommel Got What He Wanted? Part 2 Atlantic Wall

If the Germans had taken out the Mulberry harbour systems- what then? Or the storm had wiped out both of the ports.Oops.

Mulberry harbour - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The one at Omaha was out on June 19th...

The other port was used: ....to land over 2.5 million men, 500,000 vehicles, and 4 million tonnes of supplies providing much needed reinforcements in France.

Mulberry harbour - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Just direct all the V1´s towards Port Winston....??!

 

The important part of the Mulberry, as the US quickly found out, was not the docking arrangements but the outer breakwaters that were basically undestroyable (sunken ships, and concrete pontoons). After the storm the US found that unloading ships simply anchored inside the breakwater using DUKWs was far faster than having them tie up at the few available piers. In fact, it was faster than the original system had it been in perfect working order.
For LSTs and other such craft running them up on the beach was quicker than using the piers too. The USN simply brought in some standard pontoon units to use as temporary ramps for these. There were plenty of pontoons available so this was no problem.

Once Cherbourg fell the US quickly opened that port aleviating the immediate problem of supply. Of course, the Germans thought that the port was rendered unusable for the duration of the war through their demolition efforts but the USN salvage teams cleared it in less than 30 days sufficently to start operating and had it virtually completely clear in 90 days. In fact, as with other ports their efforts actually increased the capacity of the port over its pre-war levels!

 

OK, gotcha T.A.!

Got any figures for the Omaha beach or other landing zones for supplying men/ammo etc after the storm? Thanx!

 

I'll instead recommend reading The Far Shore by Edward Ellsberg, R. Adm USN. He was personally involved with the success of the Mulberries and much of the pre-D-Day logistics planning from a naval point of view.
It is an eye opening book to just how immense and prodigious the US engineering effort was in Normandy. It literally dwarfs German engineering in the previous two years.

Here are his figures for D+27 (pg 284)

929,000 men, 586,000 tons of supplies, 177,000 vehicles. The US alone through their Mulberry had 4 corps, 11 infantry and 2 armored divsions ashore along with supporting troops. On D+17 Cherbourg fell with the loss of almost 40,000 German POWs from 7th Army. 7th Army's commander, Colonel General Dollmann died of a heart attack the next day. Right before his death Dollmann in a conversation with Von Rundstedt was asked by the later "What shall we do?' Dollmann's reply was "Do?! Make peace you idiots! What else can you do?!"

 

And if I recall correctly Rundstedt returned the favour later to Jodl by the same words....