The Gamers retreat looked like a good opportunity to get into a full game of Omaha. I drew up an American landing plan and German op sheets ahead of time so I'd be ready to play either side. As it turned out, Dave Friedrichs agreed to play the Germans against me. When Sam Simons noticed me rolling the LCT(R) fires, he joined the American war effort and ended up leading our most successful drive off the beach. My purpose here is to explain the rationale behind the plans I made and to point out the lessons I learned putting the American plan into action.

The Omaha game rules allow implemented op sheets for the German reinforcements only if the German player draws them up before the game. I gave line-item counter-attack orders to the variable reinforcements for Scenario 1, assigning them to take (or retake) objectives including St. Laurent, Colleville, and the various draws. I reasoned that if I were lucky enough to roll reinforcements, they might be able to get right into some useful action rather than move for two turns and then sit down to prepare op sheets. Of course, I'd have to hope that the orders would be sensible. But considering the victory conditions and the historical imperative they reflect (stop the Americans at the water's edge), towns and single breach areas arc sensible objectives.

It's a bit of a chore writing all these orders. Dave Friedrichs ("Fred" in a room with too many Daves) thought so. And here's the first lesson. If you want to accomplish much as either the German or the American, be willing to put in some time on careful preparation. Both players have to cope with strong randomizing influences. The German has all those release, reserve activation, and variable reinforcement rolls, while the American has landing scatter. Facing such limits on control of his units, a player without good plans can start feeling that he has lost control and can do little more than react to the local situations fate deals to him.

Although the full game is too much to take on alone, I have had lots of fun playing the one-map invasion scenarios solitaire. In my experience the random factors make for interesting solo games. Obviously the American's plan is to blast his way off the beach, while the German wants to defend in place and counterattack if possible. So there are no big secrets to pretend you don't know. Me landing system deals the American a mostly unforeseeable unit distribution, and the command-phase dice rolls keep the German reaction an unknown until shortly before it happens. As a result, the solitaire player can concentrate on tactical nuts and bolts. Of course, you need a little detachment to avoid choosing the Americans' modes according to where you know you plotted the German artillery.

Solitaire play did not prepare me, though, for the magnitude of the American's problems in a full-scale assault. Having twice as much beach to attack more than doubles the complexity of your options and your chances to make bad decisions.

Aiming the American Scattergun

Give all your assault units line-item op sheets if you like, but plan from the assumption that you won't execute any of those orders. In loading boats and choosing beaches, the American's goal must be to put good fighting formations on the beach despite the landing scramble. The two principles for achieving this goal are combined arms and redundancy. Combined arms in this context means bringing to bear infantry, point weapons, and mortars for an attack in a particular beach sector. Redundancy means sending enough troops to do the job even after heavy losses.

First, combined arms. Infantry units are essential, since only they can cross the shingle, breach obstacles, and occupy breach security hexes. But considering the time and danger involved in making AT rolls against pillboxes, much of the job of knocking out those German strong points belongs to the tanks and AT guns. (The Navy can blast away at pill boxes in quiet sectors, but pill box hits there do little good except on the landing survival roll table.) Mortars are critical for laying smoke. I should mention at this point that we were playing with a proposed 3rd edition rule that prohibits 60 mm mortars from firing smoke, so every 81mm and four-duce was important. Try to assign units to boats/boat groups and boats to beaches so that you maximize the chances of landing combined arms packages without too much dispersal.

You'll never get such useful packages without "overassigning" resources. Here's where redundancy matters. If you want to get two AT guns up to the shingle and into action, send five or six. You never have enough LCTs for bringing in tanks, so take advantage of those numerous Load Class I, 2-load-point ATs. It's too bad that, as armor-less B-type targets, they die so easily. Pack in those ATs wherever they'll fit, and try to assign more than one to a boat or boat group. On the other hand, you should never have more than one smoke-capable mortar in a boat. Because of their range, you don't need to mass these mortars, and you sure don't want to put all your eggs in one seasick basket. Tanks can move up and down the shingle to where you need them, and mortars can shoot pretty far given the decent visibility off the beach. But because they are such soft targets, AT guns have to right from the shingle near where they land. Fortunately you have lots of them. So send lots. As for infantry, remember that a good portion of them will get suppressed each turn, so you'd better try to send a company to do a platoon's work.

The tactical value of smoke is no secret to TCS veterans, so I'll make only a few remarks about smoke use in the specific situation of Omaha. Except for the odd pillbox squad, the German will offer no Area targets to your troops on the beach. That's fine, since you'll want to use mortars to lay smoke. Your artillery has too few tubes and too few smoke rounds to do much, so those flexible, accurate mortars are key. You need to blind the pillboxes and, more importantly, block observation for German artillery and mortar fire.

You'll never be able to smoke the whole beach, so pick the critical area and set up good smoke screens to create blind zones. Critical areas are wherever you're trying to cross the shingle or breach obstacles plus wherever units on the beach must be in move mode. A curtain of smoke between you and the pillboxes helps you move up, but when it's time to close in for those AT rolls, drop smoke directly on the pillbox to earn the "Firer in Smoke" modifier on the Area Fire Table. Remember too that units in a smoke hex cannot observe for indirect fire.

Often your mortars will be able to self-observe their fire, except when the German "hides" a pill box in a draw or smokes in your units with big HE missions. And you have one reason to be glad the landing system scrambled your units: observers for battalion mortars are probably scattered around and have multiple lines of sight. It's true that you can try to form "massed batteries" according to 4.2 to get even more observer flexibility. But mortars trying to move around are going to waste and probably getting wasted, and if they do manage to form a massed battery, the German will blast it.

Landing DD tanks swimming is a good way to throw away your armor. Looking at the large number of US tanks and the short supply of LCTs, I sent one tank company as DDs in each of the first two waves. It was merely an act of impatience. Four of those 32 tanks--about what I could have expected--actually made it into action.

Which infantry units to send in first can be a dilemma. Is ent in the 16th RCT for historical flavor and because of those platoons' good morale. Without good morale values, the troops will spend more time suppressed on the sand and less time breaching obstacles and taking out pillboxes. On the other hand, there's something to be said for keeping the good troops alive until the fighting moves into the hedgerows where they'll need good morale and have targets for their superior firepower. In the end I decided that the overdraft reinforcements gave the 16th enough durability to lead the way. I did make sure to assign units from all the US battalions to the assault and first transport waves so I'd have the largest possible leader pool. Once all those outfits got mixed together, keeping track of who was who got complicated. But if you want to keep your troops tidy (all your Dukws in a row), don't play the Americans in Omaha.

What beaches should you aim for? In the long run you have to clear the whole beach and open up those shingle breaches. But the best place to start is in the middle (unless the Germans have the same idea, of course). Fox Red 1-4 and all of Fox Green offer good exits from the beach and four shingle breach sites. In many spots the infantry will be able to test obstacles and breach mines while protected by shingle hexsides. The other beaches present extra problems. Units landing on Dog Red, Easy Green, and Easy Red have to cross lots of wide open space. A long wall of cliffs faces Fox Red, and the incoming tide there can force some serious overcrowding. An end run through Port en Bessin looks tempting, but the German can defend there pretty easily.

The landing plan I used was far from perfect, but it illustrates the ideas I've laid out here. And it contains some very educational mistakes.

Dawn's Early Light: the First Wave

My four LCTs brought in all of a/745 tank. The other boats were 12 LCIs, which I loaded with A-E companies of the 1/1 6th. There were four 2-boat groups and four individual boats. I left out all but one of D company's MG units, since area firepower is useless against pillboxes. On the other hand, I included both mortars and two ATs from H/2/16 and made sure that each of my four 81mm mortars was in a separate boat. In addition to the ATs from the heavy weapons companies, I loaded six of the battalion ATs and four of the "big" 76mm guns from B/635 TD. Finally C/741 tank swam in as DDs. The first wave landed from the Easy Red box, loaded for bear to 01 pillboxes.

There Is a Tide: Wave Two

The LCIs brought in the rest of the 16th RCT's infantry and the 26th RCT. I made sure I had the 81mm mortars well distributed. I included all the weapons-company AT guns in the 26th, some of its regimental ATs, the ATs left over from H/2/16 and 16/1, and the rest of those B/635 guns. I got the I&R platoons of the 16th and 26th on the beach, looking for a chance to be heroes.

One mistake I made here was using a 3-boat LCI group to carry all of E/2/26 plus 5 ATs. This efficient use of load points left me with a huge target stack on the beach. As the units tried to disperse, they got picked off (the ATs) or suppressed (the infantry) in adjacent hexes, leaving a lovely artillery target out there on the sand.

In order to use the Rhinos, I filled the Dukws with the smallest and most expendable loads I could: the infantry of B/635 and all the MGs from the heavy weapons companies. But I still had eight Dukws to fill, so I loaded up two with ATs from 26/1 and six with the guns of Cannon/26. Next time I won't, because five of those six guns never made it to the beach.

The Rhinos did excellent work, though, bringing in 2 infantry companies, the 33rd FA battalion, a flak half-track (which eventually got into action!) and the A/81 mortar company with its trucks. Here is another point on which you may well question my judgment. Why send those powerful mortars merely to blow smoke at pillboxes? Why not save them for the hedgerow fighting, where they're invaluable? I explained to Sam, "Mortars are mortars, and we need them now." He agreed at the moment, being a careful counter of 81s already. Once the artillery had shot its few rounds of smoke, Sam used lots of mortar smoke to cover his drive inland from Fox Red 3.

But in retrospect, I wish I had held the mortars for the transport landings (I also putC/81 in wave 3). These units are the best, but on the beach they die like the Test. The last, tragicomic straw was Dave Freidrichs' selective targeting of one mortar company's trucks. A quick check in the rules reminded me (oops! ) that Tow-Only units without transport do not creep up the beach with the tide. After picking off the trucks, Fred left the four-duces to the inevitable. If You're going to land these units under fire, do so only at high tide.

My other mistake at 0740 was to assign some 9 LCAs to Fox Red. Because of the cliffs, the troops here spend lots of time doing nothing while the ATs traded shots with the pillboxes. At least we were "lucky" with the DDs this time: 3 tanks out of B/741 made it to the sand.

Once More into the Breach

To boost my tank strength I had to wait for wave 3, when the LCIs brought in a dozen tanks from B/745. For this wave I again loaded up the Dukws with MGs, a half-dozen ATs, and the guns from Cannon/l 6. The Dukws with Class I loads all made it, but the Cannon company lost 3 guns. To make matters worse, a Rhino with a third of Cannon/I 8's strength went down as well. I don't think I'll be loading artillery into Dukws again any time soon. If the German wants to knock out my field pieces, I'm not going to help. My 3rd-wave LCIs brought in the same sort of infantry/weapons mixture I've described above. I used four 3-boat groups this time and again had some trouble getting the stacks dispersed under German fire. Moving in stacks is suicide since one overwatch shot pounds everybody. But moving individually is tough too. Some units have to choose between moving on top of suppressed buddies, thus bringing down overwatch, and sitting out in the open come the next Suppressive Fire Phase.

I assigned all of third wave to Fox Green because of the good break-out prospects its terrain offers. I'm glad I made that choice because by that time the push was going well on that beach.

As the Dust Settles

How did the fight go? That's another story. I'll just say that at first we Americans had to battle despair. Sam would say something like, "It's suicide to move up against those pillboxes," and I'd answer, "Well, we're dying right here, so we might as well attack." (OK, that sounds like a limp version of "Mere are two kinds of people on this beach. . . .") On the other hand, even as he blew away hundreds of steps with his stinking mortars, Dave Freidrichs kept saying, "You guys are doing fine." By the second wave we seemed to be making progress. By noon (that is, when we ended the game) Sam had pushed inland and gotten into a good firefight near St(-- Honorine, while I had troops coming up the F-1 draw. We had started some hasty defense op sheets, so we were in good shape to consolidate. Sam had even '.captured" a few towns with roving Shermans. But the cost was high; already we had lost enough units to give the Germans a one-level victory shift. The American assault had been effective, but ugly.

So What's Your Point?

Once you hit the beach, there are not many fancy options. You have to get to the sea wall, battle the pillboxes, find or make holes in the obstacles, and push through your infantry assault. The time to show some finesse is in plarming those assault waves. Load your boats and assign them to beaches with an eye toward establishing combined-arms teams despite landing scatter. Take plenty of the key weapons if you want to get a useful number into action. Structure your waves so you can concentrate on a few objectives at a time-which objectives will depend on factors you cannot predict. Resist the temptation to throw away good units with questionable landing hardware (DDs and Dukws).

Once you land, some of your units will inevitably sit idle, taking casualties and contributing nothing, because of landing scatter, leader positioning, and the choices the German player makes. With good planning you can maximize the number of useful units. You can even keep your four-duces from getting waterlogged.