| D-Day, the beginning of the Allied invasion of France, took place on June 6th, 1944. It was originally planned for June 5th, as this was the day when the tides would be in the Allies' favour and a full moon would cast its light down upon the Allies at night. However, the worst weather for a great many years forced Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower to make the most difficult decision of his military career and postpone the invasion for 24 hours. It was the right decision to make as the beach landings would have been a disaster and it would have been dangerous for the paratroops to drop behind the beaches.
But such a mass of men and equipment that had been gathered in the south of England couldn't stay there for long, and everyone knew it. They would have to go on the 6th regardless of weather. Luckily, fortune smiled on the Allies and there was a miraculous improvement in the weather conditions for the 6th June. The invasion was a success and began the defeat of the Nazi forces in Europe.
The invasion was overwhelming. Around 150,000 men landed on June 6th, followed by more troops in the following days. 1,500 tanks were brought across the English Channel. There was some 5,000 boats involved. The Allies also brought 11,000 aircraft to bear against the Luftwaffe's measly 183 fighter planes in Normandy.
D-Day timeline:
00:20-04:15
The U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions drop into France around the base of the Cherbourg peninsula, behind Utah beach. They are scattered, but successful. The British 6th Airborne is dropped to the east of Caen, behind Sword beach.
02:30-03:00
The American assault fleet of the Western Task Force arrives off Omaha and Utah beaches and anchor. They begin the naval bombardment of the beach defences.
05:00-06:00
The British and Canadian assault fleet of the Eastern Task Force arrives off Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches and anchor. They commence the naval bombardment of their beach defences.
06:10
The massive Allied naval bombardment ceases in readiness for the landing troops to make their way up the beaches.
06:30
H-Hour on Utah beach. The troops meet only light resistance.
H-Hour on Omaha beach. The troops here face heavy opposition due to failed air bombing. The Americans are pinned down on the beach by German resistance until 11:00, much later than was planned.
07:25
H-Hour on Gold beach. All main objectives are accomplished by the British troops by 11:19. There is strong German opposition in Le Hamel, which is finally quelled at 16:30.
H-Hour on Sword beach. The landings here go pretty smoothly, all going roughly according to plan.
07:35-07:45
H-Hour on Juno beach. The landings here are 20 minutes late, but all the Canadians' objectives are met by 10:00.
Planning:
D-Day, or Operation Overlord as it was known, was the largest combined air, sea, and land operation ever. As such, it received an unprecedented level of meticulous planning over the course of two years. Every last detail and eventuality had to be planned for in the finest detail. Each man had to know his mission.
Location:
The first major question that had to be addressed was where the invasion should take place. The Allies had already began an invasion of Italy and were pushing the Axis forces further and further back through Italy (Rome was liberated on 4th June). It was not practical to have this as the only front Germany had to fight on. France could not easily be liberated via Italy. It was also not enough to let the Soviet forces free Europe on their own from the east. Although the Eastern Front was a major and costly distraction for Germany, the opening of an additional Western Front might just catastrophically divide Germany's forces and compound their defeat.
The most logical place for an invasion of France from England was in the area of Calais, since this was the closest point to the English coast. Of course, the German command saw this too and consequently the Calais area was made the strongest part of the "Atlantic Wall" defending the French coast. An invasion here would be difficult and costly in terms of men and equipment, but Calais' proximity to England would serve to make the tremendous logistical problem of transporting tens of thousands of men and tons and tons of equipment much easier.
Another, often forgotten, possibility was an invasion via Norway. Such an invasion may have been more effective than it initially sounds. Although Norway could be a fairly inhospitable place, the Allies, Britain in particular, had had success in staging raids there (such as the British-backed raid of a group of Norwegians to destroy the main German heavy water plant, severely damaging Germany's efforts to construct a nuclear bomb). Norway could have been a good staging post to mount an assault directly on Germany itself.
However, Norway was not favoured by Allied command. France was where they wanted to go so that they could drive the German forces out of France and the Netherlands, and move into the Rhineland to Germany, and onto Berlin. Calais was decided against in the end - it was heavily defended and too obvious. The chosen site for invasion was Normandy.
Normandy had some nice sloping beaches where troops and vehicles could land effectively. Although it did form part of Field Marshall Karl Gerd von Rundstedt's Atlantic Wall, it was not as heavily defended as Calais. Normandy, though further away than the Pas-de-Calais, was still close enough to transport the invasion force across the English Channel, and was still within the range of Allied air forces. Normandy also had the port of Cherbourg, which, once captured, could be used to bring in men, vehicles, equipment, and supplies more easily. Normandy was also thought to have fairly easy ground to move across. As it turned out, this was not to be the case due to the massive hedgerows that criss-crossed the countryside. But still, Normandy was to be the location of the invasion of Europe.
Deception:
A major part of the Allies' strategy was to confuse the German commanders over the details of the invasion. The invasion itself was no secret, the only big secrets were the time and place. The Allies could keep the Germans guessing about the exact date of the invasion by simply keeping it a closely guarded secret. They were successful in this. Although by 1944, the German command knew that invasion was soon, they could never be sure when. In fact, the chosen date of invasion could not have been better planned. Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, commanding Army Group B in Normandy, happened to choose that particular time to take some time off to visit his wife at home for her birthday.
As for the location, the Allies devised clever strategies to misdirect the German's attention. The first was through the use of double agents. The British had men feeding the German command misinformation about the invasion, all the while the Germans were under the impression they was working for them (many were captured German spies in Britain). The Germans were so pleased with some of this intelligence work that one man was awarded the Iron Cross just prior to being awarded an MBE by Britain in 1944 for his actual work! These agents guided the German command's attention to a Calais invasion, and also maintained that there would be a secondary invasion from Scotland via Norway. This strategy worked brilliantly. Even when the invasion in Normandy was fully underway, the German command still believed that this was just a faint, and the real force would be coming into the Calais area soon. As a consequence, forces that might have succeeded in pushing the Allies forces back into the Channel were held back until it was too late. Also, even after the invasion the double agent still maintained that there was going to be a front opened in Norway, thus causing the German command to keep even more forces held back well out of the way in Norway for most of the rest of the war. This whole operation was a real intelligence tour-de-force on the part of the British.
Another ingenious British ploy was to construct hundreds of inflatable, wooden, and other false tanks and amass them in fake staging grounds. This had the effect of making the Allied forces look larger than they were, and also in placing false staging grounds in places near to where an invasion of Calais would probably be launched, it further misdirected the German deployment of forces. Further misdirection was conducted through massive bombing raids on sections of the Atlantic Wall in places other than Normandy.
There was misdirection even on the invasion day itself. The invasion was to be preceded by mass drops of paratroops behind the Normandy beachhead. While the real paratroops were being dropped into Normandy, there were thousands of dummy troopers being dropped into other parts of coastal France. These straw-filled mannequins also ingeniously contained firecrackers which would go off upon landing, thus creating "gunfire" to confuse the enemy further.
Objectives for D-Day:
The main objective of D-Day was to establish beachheads at each of the five beaches, and then link them together to form one long unified beachhead. This was not achieved on D-Day, but enough of a foothold was obtained to establish the Allies in France. The only two beachheads to link together on D-Day were Gold and Juno beaches. A main concern for the Allies was to take the key town of Caen, inland from the British and Canadian beaches. However, German resistance was tough and the town did not fall into Allied hands for six weeks.
Procedure and method of invasion:
Now that the location of the invasion was decided, Allied command now needed to plan what they were actually going to do. First, they needed to decide the exact location of landing. There were to be five landing beaches, codenamed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. Before troops would land on the beaches, airborne troops were to drop behind the beaches to help secure the beachhead.
21st Army Group
General Bernard L. Montgomery
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U.S First Army British Second Army
Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley Lieutenant General Miles C. Dempsey
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VIII Corps V Corps XXX Corps I Corps
Major General Major General Lieutenant General Lieutenant General
J. Lawton Collins Leonard T. Gerow Gerard Bucknall John T. Crocker
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| | | | | | | | | |
UTAH OMAHA GOLD JUNO SWORD
U.S. U.S. British Canadian British
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\ Pointe
\ du Hoc /
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\___________|_________________________NORMANDY COAST___________________________________________/
U.S. 82nd British 6th
Airborne U.S. 101st Pegasus Bridge * Airborne
Division Airborne Division
Division
CAEN &n | 
