Lessons.

This is coolbert:

Continuing with the comments of General William Depuy: [all thanks to the Isegoria.net web site]

"Four Lessons from Normandy"

As a young captain in Normandy, General DePuy was impressed by several things the Germans did:

* "First, I was impressed with the positions that the German infantry soldiers constructed. I was impressed with the skill and the care that they took in finding positions which had cover and natural concealment. They were almost impossible to see and yet, they afforded fields of fires exactly where they needed them in order to stop us. In other words, their fieldcraft was super"

* "The second thing that I learned was about the depth of German positions. We just had one line. The Germans had a little zone defense so that they had elasticity and resilience. You could not punch through it very easily. They didn’t do things in a linear way."

* "I guess I was impressed with their use of just one, two or three mechanized vehicles like assault guns or tanks . . . most of the time, when you ran into German positions, you would run into a mixture of infantry and some kind of tracked fighting vehicles."

* "The fourth thing that I was absolutely convinced of was suppression. The Germans were masters of suppression using machine pistols." [machine pistol best understood as a sub machine gun, an automatic weapon firing a pistol round]

AGAIN, THAT TERRAIN VERY FAVORABLE FOR THE DEFENSE, THAT OVERWHELMING ADVANTAGE AMERICAN FORCES POSSESSED IN THE WAY OF ARMOR, ARTILLERY, CLOSE-AIR-SUPPORT TACTICAL AVIATION NEGATED BY THE NATURE OF THE CLOSE-QUARTER COMBAT AND HUGGING TACTICS OF THE GERMAN!!

coolbert.