Boat in water soldiers to shore

The expression “D-Day” was not coined for the Allied invasion. The same name was given to the attack date of nearly every planned offensive during World War II. It was first coined during World War I (1914-1918), before the massive United States attack at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel in France. The “D” was short for day. The expression literally meant “Day-day.” It signified the day of an attack. By the end of World War II, however, the expression was synonymous with only one date: June 6, 1944.

In spring 1942, just months after the United States entered the war raging in Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt informed Soviet premier Joseph Stalin that he expected the formation of a second front against Germany that very year. At that point the only front against the Germans was the eastern front in which Soviet forces were fighting German and other Axis forces that had driven deep into the territory of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Roosevelt’s assurance proved wishful thinking, but it was the best the United States could offer the USSR, which was confronting the concentrated might of the German Army, known as the Wehrmacht. Russians were dying by the hundreds of thousands, and Roosevelt knew that a Soviet defeat meant the end of any meaningful resistance to the juggernaut led by German dictator Adolf Hitler.

In 1942 United States military leaders were pressing their British allies for an attack across the English Channel into occupied France by spring 1943. As the ferocious Battle of Stalingrad raged in late 1942, U.S. officials pressured the British to prepare for the invasion of France. The motive was to siphon German military strength away from the USSR. Reluctantly, the British agreed to a plan called Operation Roundup, scheduled for 1943. But later, the British demonstrated that Allied forces did not yet have the massive forces, ships, landing craft, and supplies needed for a cross-channel invasion. The British shifted the Allied focus from France to an attack on German forces in North Africa and an eventual invasion of Italy, Germany’s ally, from the Mediterranean Sea.

Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill tried to appease a furious Stalin by increasing lend-lease aid to the USSR and calling for Germany’s “unconditional surrender.” The call for an unconditional surrender was meant to assure Stalin that Britain and the United States would never agree to a separate, negotiated peace agreement with Germany. For Stalin, all this was window dressing. What he needed was a second front to relieve his blood-drained nation from the German onslaught.

The subsequent Allied victory in North Africa in May 1943 delayed the D-Day invasion in France by a year and affected it in another way as well. German field marshal Erwin Rommel, the respected strategist known as the “Desert Fox,” had lost North Africa, but in Germany he was still regarded as a hero. Hitler ordered Rommel to inspect fortifications along the Atlantic coast from the French border with Spain to the Dutch border with Germany: the defense installation known as the Atlantic Wall.

The Nazis were well aware that the Allies were considering an invasion across the English Channel, so Rommel was soon given direct responsibility for defending northern France, Belgium, and Holland against an Allied landing. It was a job better suited to a spider, who could spin a web and wait for prey, than to a fox, at his best on the move as he was as a commander of a tank corps in North Africa. Rommel diligently made improvements to fortifications along the coast and tried to anticipate the Allies’ next move.

Until the spring of 1943, the Allies were unsure when a cross-channel invasion might be possible. An effective planning team under British lieutenant general Sir Frederick E. Morgan started analyzing the possibilities in March 1943. In the meantime, the United States continued to press its impatience upon the British. They did so not through diplomacy but through massive deployment of troops and supplies.

By June 1943 German U-boats had been largely defeated by Allied antisubmarine sea and air patrols and had withdrawn from the North Atlantic where they had taken a merciless toll on U.S. merchant ships carrying supplies to Britain. After the defeat of the U-boats, the sea lane was largely safe for the flow of supplies and equipment from the United States to supply depots throughout Britain. Certain locations in Britain became one large staging area, with tanks lined up in rows literally by the mile, and fighter planes disappearing into the distance like some sort of abstract painting. D-Day was obviously coming, but it awaited a firm plan and the commanders to carry it out.

Finally, in late November 1943, a course was set at the Tehrān Conference between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in Iran, where the British finally concurred with the Soviets and the Americans that the time had come for the invasion. A D-Day offensive in Europe had become an imperative. At Tehrān, the three Allied leaders formally agreed to go on the offensive on the western front. “The history of war does not know an undertaking comparable to it for breadth of conception, grandeur of scale, and mastery of execution,” Stalin later claimed. The strategy had to encompass two major challenges: to cross some hundred miles of open water with a vast army and then fight a battle on a scale never attempted before.

Preparations

Britain and the United States agreed that the supreme commander for the invasion would be an American, and Roosevelt chose U.S. Army general Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Allied ground forces commander for the D-Day invasion, which was code named Operation Overlord, was British general Bernard Montgomery. The broad outline of the attack was relatively simple: find suitable beaches, gather a landing force, isolate the battlefield by attacking bridges, tunnels, and rail networks so that the German defenders could not be easily reinforced, and land the troops. Once a beachhead was established, the plan was to pour in the supplies needed to sustain an offensive and then break out into the French countryside. Executing the plan was not so simple. Crossing the treacherous English Channel with its unexpected storms, enormous tides, and tricky currents would be just the first step of the amphibious assault.

The attack on Fortress Europe, as it was known, required the utmost secrecy. The assembling force was isolated in southern England to prevent details of the plan from leaking out, and deceptive measures were taken to mislead the Germans about the intended landing site. The deceptive measures included phony tanks and landing craft, some made of cardboard, plywood, or rubber, and a dummy oil tank farm near Dover, the English town closest to the European mainland and just opposite the city of Calais, France. This elaborate effort was intended to make the Germans believe that the invasion would come from Dover. The effort was so successful that Germany kept its main forces in the Pas-de-Calais region even after the invasion took place, as Hitler feared that the Normandy invasion was only a feint and the main invasion was yet to come.

The Allied planners focused on the beaches around Caen and the Cotentin Peninsula in northern France rather than those of Calais, even though it meant the force would be crossing at a wider part of the English Channel. That disadvantage was far outweighed by what the site offered: comparatively scanty defensive fortifications and beachhead ideally suited for successful exits. The clincher was an isolated battlefield that the Germans would have difficulty reinforcing.

The date was set for May 1, 1944, to allow for a dawn invasion at low tide, when beach obstacles that could impede the landing craft would be visible. But it soon became apparent that the May 1 date would find the Allies still short of the landing craft necessary to mount the great invasion. Reluctantly, Eisenhower reset D-Day to the next suitable date—June 5, 1944. The force continued to assemble as British, Canadian, and American soldiers flooded into southern England. The Allies planned to put 5 divisions on the beaches for an initial assault against a defending German force of 50 infantry and 11 armored divisions stationed in France. The average German division had about 10,000 soldiers.

Invasion begins

A storm forced postponement to June 6, so it was just before midnight on June 5 that more than 20,000 Allied airborne troops parachuted into France. Their mission was to seize and hold the bridges and roads the Germans could use to move to the battlefields once the great amphibious maneuvers began. The British airborne landed on the left of the invasion area; the American on the right. Both drops suffered from scattering, particularly of the U.S. paratroopers, because of enemy ground fire and a lack of navigational aids. The troops had to locate one another and then move and fight in small groups, many unrelated by unit, rather than in organized battle formations as planned. The one advantage of this scattering was that it confused the enemy, who had great difficulty determining the size and scope of the invading force. By the end of D-Day, the exits from the beaches and the entrances to the battle area were both held by the Allies.

The assault beaches were named, from west to east, Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. The Americans landed at Omaha and Utah, the Canadians at Juno, and the British at Gold and Sword. America’s forces included the 1st, 4th, and 29th Infantry Divisions, and the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. The British sent their 3rd and 50th Infantry Divisions and 6th Airborne Division, while the Canadians used their 3rd Infantry Division. Shortly after 6 am the invasion rolled ashore. At Sword, Gold, and Utah, enemy resistance was relatively light, and the Allied forces had considerable success; on Utah Beach, for example, U.S. soldiers moved rapidly up roadways leading from the beach to join some of the airborne troops.

At Juno, meanwhile, the invading Canadians faced a beach littered with partially submerged obstacles. Landing craft were forced to feel their way in. The troops waded ashore and zigzagged through the obstacles, but German mines took a heavy toll. In the first hour of the invasion at Juno, 50 percent of the Canadian assault team members became casualties.

The savagery peaked at Omaha Beach, the largest of the Overlord assault areas, where the Germans had built formidable defenses and heavily mined the waters and the sand. Their weapons were fixed to cover the beach with spraying fire from three directions. Omaha was designed to be a killing zone.

West of Omaha beach, a promontory known as Pointe du Hoc jutted into the English Channel. The promontory provided an elevated vantage point from which huge German guns could fire upon both Omaha and Utah beaches. Intelligence and photo reconnaissance had identified six 155-mm guns in casemates (defensive structures made of concrete) on the point. The Allied command knew Omaha was the key to the fate of the landings.

The task of neutralizing the German guns fell to the U.S. Army Second Ranger Battalion. Three companies landed at Pointe du Hoc at 7:10 am and began scaling the cliffs to engage the Germans on top in a heavy firefight. Within minutes of the landing the first Ranger was up the cliff; then the others fought their way in small groups to the casemates, only to find the 155-mm guns removed. The Rangers moved forward, sending a two-man patrol down a narrow road leading south, where they discovered some guns 500 yards from the crewmates. The two Americans quickly put the guns out of action with special thermite grenades, handheld incendiary devices that soldiers used to destroy equipment. Shortly after 9 am the Army Rangers on Pointe du Hoc had accomplished their mission. The cost was half their fighting force.

At Omaha Beach itself everything went wrong. Most of the tanks launched to support the infantry sank. With few exceptions, units did not land where planned because strong winds and tidal currents had scattered the boats in all directions. Throughout the landing the formidable German defensive positions showered deadly fire upon the ranks of invading Americans. Bodies and damaged craft littered the sand. Men seeking refuge behind obstacles pondered the deadly sprint across the beach to the seawall, which offered at last some protection at the base of the cliff.

Most historians regard D-Day as the turning point of World War II. There were certainly other pivotal moments: moments when great battles were won or important decisions made. But in sheer magnitude of accomplishments, nothing compared to D-Day. Churchill deemed it “the most difficult and most complicated operation ever to take place.” That was saying a lot. For it was a rare day during the war when something crucial did not transpire somewhere in the Pacific, Burma-India-China, the Middle East, North Africa, the Soviet Union, the North Atlantic, or Europe.