The idea behind the ruse was to trick the Nazis into thinking that the invasion would occur at Pas-de-Calais, the closest French coastline to England.
Explore how the battle unfolded in our interactive timeline of the day. Two months before D-Day, Allied forces conducted a disastrous dress rehearsal of the Normandy invasion on an evacuated English beach called Slapton Sands. Since Operation Overlord was launched from England, the U. Troops and supplies were in place by May, but bad weather delayed the launch date of the invasion. On June 5, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in charge of Operation Overlord, decided that the invasion would happen the next day, in part because the weather was still rough and Nazi planes were grounded.
American paratroopers attached to the static line just prior to jumping during the invasion of Normandy, France. The D-Day invasion began in the pre-dawn hours of June 6 with thousands of paratroopers landing inland on the Utah and Sword beaches in an attempt to cut off exits and destroy bridges to slow Nazi reinforcements. American paratroopers suffered high casualties at Utah beach, some drowning under heavy equipment in flooded marshland, others shot out of the sky by Nazi snipers.
The British and Canadian paratroopers met less resistance at Sword beach and quickly took two key bridges. In wave after wave of thousands of landing ships, more than , Allied infantrymen stormed the five beaches.
Facing them were around 50, Germans troops. Stormy seas made the landings incredibly difficult, with many regiments coming ashore far from their target destinations. At Omaha Beach, only two of the 29 amphibious tanks even made it to land on their own power three were later transported to the beach. It was here that Adolf Hitler had put the bulk of his panzer divisions after being tipped off by Allied undercover agents posing as German sympathizers that the invasion would take place in the Pas de Calais.
Surprise was an essential element of the Allied invasion plan. If the Germans had known where and when the Allies were coming they would have hurled them back into the sea with the 55 divisions they had in France. The invaders would have been on the offensive with a to-1 manpower ratio against them. The challenges of mounting a successful landing were daunting. The English Channel was notorious for its rough seas and unpredictable weather, and the enemy had spent months constructing the Atlantic Wall, a 2,mile line of obstacles.
This defensive wall comprised 6. And the German army would be dug in on the cliffs overlooking the American landing beaches. Image: Eisenhower Presidential Library.
In the meantime, they prepared ceaselessly for the attack. Trucks, tanks, and tens of thousands of troops poured into England.
But on the morning of June 4, foul weather over the English Channel forced Eisenhower to postpone the attack for 24 hours. The delay was unnerving for soldiers, sailors, and airmen, but when meteorologists forecast a brief window of clearer weather over the channel on June 6, Eisenhower made the decision to go.
It was one of the gutsiest decisions of the war. Just after midnight on June 6, Allied airborne troops began dropping behind enemy lines. Their job was to blow up bridges, sabotage railroad lines, and take other measures to prevent the enemy from rushing reinforcements to the invasion beaches. There were five beaches that were chosen for the operation, codenamed, from east to west, Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha, Utah.
Casualty rates were slightly higher than they were during a typical day during the Battle of the Somme in Having been given his top-secret mission to attack the Merville battery on D-Day, Terence Otway had to be certain his men wouldn't spill the beans ahead of 6 June He sent 30 of the prettiest members of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, dressed in civilian clothes, into village pubs near where his soldiers were training.
They were asked to do all they could to discover the men's mission. None of the men gave anything away. Image source, IWM. Photography appeal. Image source, Getty Images. Phantom army. Two million troops. Weather watching. Rommel's shoes. He was in Germany when the news came of the invasion.
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