D-Day, 1944: the longest day on the Normandy beaches

Before dawn on 6 June 1944 the largest amphibious invasion in the history of war crossed a gray, heaving English Channel. Nearly 7,000 ships and landing craft carried and escorted the assault, and by nightfall some 156,000 to 160,000 Allied soldiers were ashore or had dropped from the sky. What began on those beaches did not end the war, but it opened the second front in the west and began the liberation of Western Europe.²

Part of The greatest battles of World War II · Next: The Battle of Falaise · Key figures: Dick Winters, Omar Bradley

Background: the second front

By 1944 Germany had been dominant in western Europe for four years. Since 1942 Stalin had pressed Roosevelt and Churchill to open a second front in the west, which would draw German strength away from the Soviet Union, but the Western Allies first lacked the army and the landing craft for it. Britain had begun planning a return to the Continent soon after the evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940.³ › The Dunkirk Evacuation, 1940

Detailed planning began under the British general Frederick Morgan, whose staff drew up the first plan for Operation Overlord, a landing in Normandy, in 1943. At the Tehran conference at the end of that year the invasion was fixed for the spring of 1944, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower was chosen to lead it as supreme Allied commander.⁴

The Germans knew an invasion was coming. Hitler sent Field Marshal Erwin Rommel to inspect the coastal defenses and then to command Army Group B on the Channel coast. The Atlantic Wall along the coast was still often incomplete and short of men, and the German commanders quarreled over where to place the tank divisions, near the coast or held back in reserve.⁵

Armies and commanders

Eisenhower held the supreme command, with General Bernard Montgomery in command of the Allied ground forces. Montgomery insisted on a broader assault: five infantry divisions, two American, two British and one Canadian, landing on beaches code-named, from west to east, Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword, with two American airborne divisions dropping at the western end and one British at the eastern. The Americans formed the US First Army under Omar Bradley, the British and Canadians the British Second Army under Miles Dempsey.⁶

By 1944 over 2 million troops from more than 12 countries had gathered in Britain. American, British and Canadian soldiers made up most of the assault, but French, Polish, Norwegian, Dutch, Belgian, Czech, Greek, Australian and New Zealand forces also took part at sea, in the air or on land.⁷

On the German side Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt was commander in chief in the West, with Rommel's Army Group B, and its Seventh Army in Normandy, under him. The chain of command was rigid and confused, and many decisions were reserved for Hitler himself.⁸

Surprise was the Allies' best weapon. Through Operation Fortitude and a web of deceptions, they persuaded the German command that the main blow would fall on the Pas-de-Calais, the shortest crossing. A phantom army group in southeast England, supposedly commanded by General George S. Patton, was conjured out of false radio traffic,.⁹

D-Day in phases

The decision. The invasion was set for 5 June, but bad weather forced Eisenhower to postpone it by a day. On the morning of 5 June, assured by his chief meteorologist of a break in the weather, he gave the order to go, and that evening the fleet sailed.¹⁰

The airborne night. Shortly after midnight more than 18,000 Allied paratroopers began landing behind the beaches. The American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, dropped into flooded country at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula, lost many men by drowning but secured their objectives, while on the eastern flank the British 6th Airborne Division, with the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, secured the line of the Orne.¹¹

The landings. The seaborne landings began at about 6:30 in the morning. On Gold, Juno and Sword the British and Canadians overcame their opposition and fought their way inland, and the Americans at Utah got ashore with light losses. At Juno the Canadian 3rd Division landed alongside the British.¹²

Omaha. At Omaha the American 1st Division met one of the best German coastal divisions, and the air and naval bombardment had failed to knock out its strongpoints. Machine guns cut down the troops as they waded ashore, and for much of the morning the landing threatened to fail. Only the leadership of small groups on the beach got the survivors up the bluffs and inland.¹³

The Polish ships. Polish ships and airmen fought from the first hours. The cruiser ORP Dragon and the escort destroyers ORP Krakowiak and ORP Ślązak supported the British landing at Sword with their guns, the destroyers ORP Błyskawica and ORP Piorun guarded the invasion against German warships, and Polish bomber and fighter squadrons flew over the Channel and the beachhead.¹⁴

The German answer. With Rommel away on leave, Hitler at first refused to release the tank reserves. In the afternoon tanks of the 21st Panzer Division drove into the gap between Sword and Juno and almost reached the sea, until British antitank guns and naval gunfire stopped them. By nightfall the Allies held a foothold along the coast from which they would not be thrown back.¹⁵ › 6 June in military history

The battle for Normandy

Linking the beaches took six days: only on 12 June, after a hard fight for Carentan, did the American sectors join. The Allies poured in men and supplies, at first over open beaches and through artificial Mulberry harbours, until a great storm in the Channel on 19 June wrecked the American harbour. Cherbourg, the only deep-water port in the area, fell at the end of June.¹⁶

Then the advance stalled. In the American sector the bocage, small fields walled in by high, thick hedgerows and sunken lanes, gave every advantage to the defender. In the east the British and Canadians fought for Caen in a series of costly offensives, among them Epsom at the end of June and Goodwood on 18 July, which drew most of the German armor onto their front but failed to break through.¹⁷

The strain told on the German command too. Rundstedt was replaced by Günther von Kluge in early July after telling Hitler the war was lost, and on 17 July Rommel was badly wounded when British aircraft strafed his car. On 20 July German officers tried and failed to kill Hitler, and afterward his grip on the army was total.¹⁸

Turning point: Cobra and the Falaise pocket

On 25 July the Americans launched Operation Cobra west of Saint-Lô after a massive air bombardment. Facing a front stripped of tanks, they broke through, took Avranches on 30 July, and George Patton's Third Army raced into Brittany and then east. Hitler ordered a counterattack toward Avranches at Mortain on 7 August; warned by Ultra intercepts, the Americans stopped it.¹⁹

The German armies in Normandy were now in danger of encirclement as the Americans swung north and the Canadians and Poles pushed south toward Falaise. The 1st Polish Armoured Division of General Stanisław Maczek fought at Chambois, where its men linked up with the Americans on 19 August, and on Hill 262 on the Mont Ormel ridge, which Maczek called the Mace, holding the Germans' last escape route until Canadian troops relieved them on 21 August.²⁰ › The Battle of Falaise, 1944

How many Germans escaped is told differently. The Imperial War Museums count around 50,000 who got out of the pocket and 60,000 killed or captured inside it; John Keegan, writing for Britannica, has some 240,000 men in all reach the Seine without their equipment, leaving behind 50,000 dead and 200,000 prisoners in Normandy.²¹

Aftermath

Paris rose against its German garrison on 19 August and was liberated on 25 August, and by the end of the month the Germans had fallen back across the Seine. The cost was very high. On D-Day itself about 4,400 Allied soldiers were killed, by the count reported by the Associated Press, and German losses that day are estimated at 4,000 to 9,000 killed, wounded and missing. Over the whole campaign the Allies suffered more than 200,000 casualties, and the Germans close to 300,000, or more than 300,000 by Keegan's reckoning.²²

The people of Normandy paid too. The fighting, and above all the Allied bombing of towns and villages such as Caen, killed many thousands of French civilians: about 20,000 by the estimates of the Imperial War Museums and the Associated Press, more than 12,000 in Keegan's figure.²³

Legacy and memory

The Normandy campaign opened the western front that, together with the Soviet offensive in Belorussia launched that June, broke the German army. The Imperial War Museums write that it ultimately convinced the German high command that defeat was inevitable, though the war in Europe would last until May 1945. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that the invasion likely contributed to the survival of hundreds of thousands of Jews in western and central Europe.²⁴ › The Greatest Battles of World War II

For Poland the campaign is remembered above all through Maczek's division at Falaise and the ships and squadrons that fought on D-Day; the cruiser Dragon was later crippled off the beaches by a German human torpedo on the night of 7 to 8 July.²⁵

Visiting the battlefield today

On the cliff above Omaha Beach at Colleville-sur-Mer lies the Normandy American Cemetery, run by the American Battle Monuments Commission: some 9,400 white headstones of men killed in the landings and the campaign that followed, and a garden whose walls bear the names of almost 1,600 missing.²⁶