Bing

Both sides were plagued by a shortage of supplies. The Allies had an abundance of shipping but found it difficult to off-load matériel across the beaches, and the two MULBERRYs, while ingenious, could not accommodate the thousands of tons of food and ammunition that were required daily. At the end of the first week, less than 50 percent of the sche

Rather than order a preliminary naval bombardment of at least four hours with the heaviest guns in the fleet, as was customary in the Pacific, Bradley sent the troops ashore at Omaha with a “shoe string bombardment fleet” and allowed the ships only forty minutes to attack German fortifications that had been years in the making.2

As the ill-fated amphibious assault by British and Canadian commandos on the French port of Dieppe in August 1942 proved, Hitler’s West Wall was a tough nut to crack.

Unlike the 1944 D-Day landing in Normandy, for which the Allies had three years to prepare, TORCH was mounted in two months, with sketchy intelligence about landing sites, improvised shipping arrangements, and an Army that had never seen combat.

Allied losses were similar: three thousand killed, wounded, or missing; more than a dozen ships, including the battleship Massachusetts and the cruisers Wichita and Brooklyn, sunk or heavily damaged; and seventy planes shot down.27