It was 80 years ago today that more than 156,000 Allied soldiers began what General Eisenhower called ‘a great crusade’ to liberate Europe from four years of Nazi rule. Before the day was over, 10,000 Allied soldiers would become casualties, with 4,400 giving their lives on those five bloody beachheads. Nearly 9,000 Germans soldiers, many of them not even German, would also become casualties.
Known to the world today as simply “D-Day”, June 6, 1944, proved to be the turning point in the European Theatre during World War II. Eisenhower called it the “day of days” while his German counterpart, Erwin Rommel, referred to it as “the longest day.” Both men understood the success or failure of that day would determine Germany’s fate in the months to come.
For nearly four years, the invasion was planned in secret and surrounded by a bodyguard of lies to keep it that way. The German High Command was convinced the Allied invasion would come further north at the Pas d’Calais, where France and England are separated by only 10 miles of open sea. The real target had always been further south, where France and England are separated at their widest point across the Channel.
Assault troops boarded their ships on June 4, expecting to land the following morning, but a storm front delayed the attack. Eisenhower was told there would be a brief break in the weather beginning on the sixth of June, otherwise the invasion would have to wait another month for tidal and lunar conditions to be ideal again.
Ike couldn’t wait that long and gambled on the break in the weather.
The Germans, too, knew of the storm front and many of the senior officers left their command posts to attend a conference in which they would wargame the unlikely scenario of an Allied invasion of Normandy. Even Rommel, their commander, decided to head home to visit his wife on her birthday, June 6.
In the early hours of June 6, troop ships were ordered out to sea from ports all across southern England, all timed to arrive off Normandy at dawn. Shortly after, transport planes and gliders lifted off to deliver three airborne divisions behind the German lines. Their mission was to cut the beaches off from reinforcement by seizing key bridges and crossroads.
While the British division landed in good order, the American divisions were scattered all over the countryside. Some pilots, unaccustomed to flying in combat, flew too fast, stripping paratroopers of their equipment as they exited the plane. Others flew too low, not giving the troopers time to deploy their chutes. Still others mistimed their jumps, ordering the troops out too early or too late, missing their drop zones entirely. Some of these paratroopers ended up landing in flooded fields and drown under the weight of their equipment while their comrades were machine gunned as they floated down into a crowded town square filled with angry Germans.
But the seeming disaster proved to be a blessing as reports of paratroopers being spotted over such a large area overwhelmed the Germans’ ability to counterattack. Small groups of paratroopers from different units banded together, improvised as best they could, and still carried out their assigned missions despite the confusion.
Shortly after dawn, the invasion fleet arrived off the coast. Thousands of ships, ranging from landing ships to battleships and everything in between. Across five land beaches, British, American, Canadian, French, Dutch, and Polish troops boarded small landing craft and made the final dash to the shore.
Many never got that far.
Those who did were met by a hail of fire from artillery, mortars and machine guns. The British and Canadians made quick work of the German defenses and broke out into the countryside. The American Fourth Infantry Division landed in the wrong place, nearly 2 miles from where they were supposed to be. Fortunately, the fortifications here were not completed and the assist and division commander, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. decided “to start the war from right here.”
The worst of it came on Omaha Beach, near the center of the landings. Two American divisions were pinned down for most of the day under heavy fire from the fortified bluffs above. At one point, the Allied High Command considered evacuating the survivors from the beach, but that would’ve proved even more costly.
Brigadier General Norman Cota of the 29th Infantry Division boiled it down to two choices for the men on Omaha, telling his men, “Gentlemen, we are being killed on the beaches. Let us go inland and be killed.”
One by one, small groups of GIs began making headway. Each small gain led to another until the two divisions made their way inland.
The next day, walking along Omaha beach, correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote, “Ashore, facing us, were more enemy troops than we had in our assault waves. The advantages were all theirs, the disadvantages all ours. The Germans were dug into positions that they had been working on for months, although these were not yet all complete. A one-hundred-foot bluff a couple of hundred yards back from the beach had great concrete gun emplacements built right into the hilltop. These opened to the sides instead of to the front, thus making it very hard for naval fire from the sea to reach them. They could shoot parallel with the beach and cover every foot of it for miles with artillery fire.
“Then they had hidden machine-gun nests on the forward slopes, with crossfire taking in every inch of the beach. These nests were connected by networks of trenches, so that the German gunners could move about without exposing themselves.
“In addition to these obstacles, they had floating mines offshore, land mines buried in the sand of the beach, and more mines in checkerboard rows in the tall grass beyond the sand. And the enemy had four men on shore for every three men we had approaching the shore.
“And yet we got on.”
Pyle went on to describe the flotsam and jetsam of battle, left behind as men fought to survive. “Here in a jumbled row for mile on mile are soldiers' packs. Here are socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles and hand grenades. Here are the latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out.
“Here are toothbrushes and razors and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. Here are pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody, abandoned shoes. Here are broken-handled shovels, and portable radios smashed almost beyond recognition, and mine detectors twisted and ruined.
“The strong, swirling tides of the Normandy coastline shift the contours of the sandy beach as they move in and out. They carry soldiers' bodies out to sea, and later they return them. They cover the bodies of heroes with sand, and then in their whims they uncover them.”
Eighty years have passed since that fateful day of days. Very few, if any, of the men who survived it are with us anymore, having passed on over the last eight decades. D-Day was not the end of the war, there were still 337 more days of fierce fighting ahead, but it was the beginning of the end.
These men are truly heroes for they did nothing less than save the world.
