Scaling the Cliffs of Normandy Posted on 11/9/2018 at 23:35:10 by Bill Crawford, (14)
I just finished watching a documentary on the AHC Channel covering the D-Day assault on the Pointe Du Hoc, a small beachhead midway between Utah and Omaha Beach, which was dominated by 100 ft vertical cliffs.
According to the below-linked Wikipedia article, the assault involved only ten landing craft and 225 Rangers.
One wonders why such an assault was worth the effort; i.e., to capture an area serving as an observation post, and to capture a few german gun mounts, which, as it turned out, had been previously removed by the Germans.
It looks like such an effort would have been a suicide mission from the beginning.
However, the cliffs were scaled and the area taken by the Rangers, with 90 of the 225 Rangers surviving the attack.
