D-Day: Operation Overlord
June 6th, 2023
79 years ago today, June 6th, 1944, Operation Overlord (the official name for the D-Day invasion) made landfall in France on Adolf Hitler's "Festung Europa" (in English, Fortress Europe). It was orginally planned to start on June 5th, 1944 but due to bad weather, it was delayed by one day. On June 6th, 156,115 troops of the U.S., Canadian, and British armies landed in France. The entire operation required paratroopers to secure areas inland from the beaches.
The group of paratroopers that were supposed to help the troops on Utah were planned to be dropped near Sainte-Mère-Église, but with the bad weather most landed in the village with three landing on the local church roof, one landing in a house on fire, and one landing in a greenhouse. There may be more undocumented cases of paratroopers landing in the village but, these are the only known ones. The paratrooper’s commander General James Gavin, who was in charge of the 82nd airborne and the youngest general in history, said on June 5th, the day before the attack: “Either you will kill or you will be killed”. On the German front, they were caught by surprise because of the bad weather and the entire German command relaxed from the lowest ranking private (technically, that isn't the rank, just the Allied counterpart of it) all the way up to Hitler himself.
German commander Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel was either in Paris buying shoes for his wife or in Germany for his wife’s birthday, nobody really knows. Hitler also believed that the Allies were going to land in Calais which would have had a harbor, and would be 30 miles from Britain and be much easier to get to Germany. The Germans were also caught off guard by the French Resistance with their secret orders to harass the Germans by cutting electrical and telephone wires and attacking German troops and barracks. On June 7th-8th two Mulberry harbors (which are artificial harbors) arrived at the beaches, with one going to Omaha and the other going to Gold for resupply ships to deliver their supplies.
The main reason in my opinion that Operation Overlord was such a huge success, was because of the Allies having another operation, Operation Fortitude using General Patton (whom the Germans thought would lead the mission) to lead a huge, but fake army stationed near Dover, England positioned to land troops near Calais, France (which was only 20 or so miles from Dover) with hundreds of inflatable tanks, several hundred wooden aircraft, and probably thousands of inflatable (and some real) jeeps, plus thousands of men (this time all real) just to trick the Germans.
The Allies had actually considered landing at Calais, but Normandy was chosen due to its lighter fortifications and not being located in the middle of a city. One of the hardest things for General Patton on this operation was he had to make everything very realistic for a few reasons: 1. If he only had high flying German aircraft, he could of just used huge pieces of plywood. 2. He didn't have high flying aircraft unfortunately, so he had to make it three dimensional. 3. To counter the threat of German spies, he had to do the entire operation even more realistically, because if a German spy was watching, it had to look like a normal military training base during wartime.
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