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</div><div class='quotemain'>I believe the British handgrenades are shaped almost identical to a baseball in size and shape[/b]
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Here is a picture with details of the standard british grenade of ww2, you can clearly see the shape was is not really aerodynamic
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</div><div class='quotemain'>Besides, if you need to kill some men on top of a cliff, why not use the M79s? They launched 40mm grenades up to 380 yards and could be carried by any soldier.[/b]
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the Blooper was not delivered to the American army until 1961, I do not think the rangers on Omaha beach would be prepared to wait that length of time before breaking out.
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</div><div class='quotemain'>The US Rangers got up Pointe du Hoc which was 100 yards up. No funny could help them there. They got up those cliffs guarded by two hundred men and lost only 15 of their own. There are more ways to skin a cat than choking it to death with butter.
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nobody is disputing the heroism and ingenuity of the Rangers, however, you think about how long they had been on the beach, how many men had died in the mean time and more importantly, the planned assult on the beach and the importance that placed on having armour in posistion before landing the engineers and then troops.
had the DD Shermans been in place then there would have been covering fire in the intial stage, as there was no 88s at beach level then the DDs would have some protection as the angle of depression of the 88 was not all that good.
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</div><div class='quotemain'>But it is unreasonable to expect the US to invest in that idea because of its improbabilty of ever finding an application that would justify its fuel usage and crew.
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I know it is outwith the subject matter of this forum but America did employ "Funnies" in both korea and Vietnamese wars.
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</div><div class='quotemain'>No way that Omaha beach would have been any different if the tanks that were sinking when the LCTs were getting hung up in the underwater barricades would have been Funnies instead of Shermans or M7s.[/b]
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Lets not forget that the DD sank because their commander ordered them to turn beam on to the waves and they werer swamped. He had no training in operating in anything other than inland waters.
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