On 5 June 1944 General Dwight D. Eisenhower confirmed that the Allied invasion of Normandy, already postponed a day by bad weather, would go in the next morning. The assault convoys sailed from southern England, and shortly after midnight American and British airborne troops landed in France, seizing the bridges over the Caen Canal and the Orne.
Sunday night or Monday dawn?
At 9:30 p.m. on Sunday 4 June the commanders met again, with wind and rain lashing the house. Stagg now forecast a break in the weather that would last into Tuesday. Calling the invasion off meant waiting for the next suitable tides and moon, about two weeks away, at the risk of losing secrecy.1
Here the accounts part. The US Army official historian, Gordon A. Harrison, and the Canadian official historian, C. P. Stacey, place the decision at that evening meeting; at a last meeting, shortly after midnight in Harrison and at about 4:00 a.m. in Stacey, nothing had changed and the order stood. The British official history by L. F. Ellis and Tim Rives of the Eisenhower Presidential Library treat the evening decision as provisional and made final before dawn on 5 June. Eisenhower's own report reads: "At 0400 hours of 5 June, I took the final and irrevocable decision: the invasion of France would take place on the following day". The sources time that last meeting between 4:00 and 4:30 a.m., and Stacey notes "a rather remarkable disparity between the various versions of these events".2
Not even the words are certain. Rives found that the witnesses could not agree on what Eisenhower said, and that Eisenhower himself gave several versions over the years, among them "OK, we'll go" in a CBS documentary aired in 1964.3
After the decision Eisenhower wrote a short press statement to be used if the landings failed, and misdated it "July 5". In it he took the responsibility on himself: "If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone".4
The armada sails
On 5 June the assault convoys sailed from the ports of southern England. The sea was still rough, with waves five to six feet high in mid-Channel.5
That evening Eisenhower visited paratroopers of the US 101st Airborne Division at Greenham Common, near Newbury, before they boarded their planes. Late on 5 June more than 13,000 American paratroopers took off for Normandy in troop transports.6
The British 6th Airborne Division went in the same night: the drop and glider landing of its parachute brigades was Operation Tonga, and 98 gliders were sent off.7
Siege of Dunboy, 1602: the last stand of O'Sullivan Beare's castle
Early June to 18 June 1602 · 424 years ago
In the Nine Years' War in Ireland, Sir George Carew's English army besieged Dunboy Castle on the Beara peninsula, whose small garrison served the Gaelic lord Donal Cam O'Sullivan Beare. The castle fell on the eleventh day of the siege.
Read the full story of Siege of Dunboy, 1602: the last stand of O'Sullivan Beare's castle ›Operation Tonga
5 June 1944 · 82 years ago
Waiting for the weather
The landings needed a combination of tide and moonlight found on only a few days each month; in June 1944 those days were the 5th, 6th and 7th. If they were missed, the next chance came on 19 June.8
The commanders met at Southwick House near Portsmouth. On the evening of Saturday 3 June the chief meteorologist, Group Captain J. M. Stagg, forecast an overcast, stormy 5 June, with high winds and a cloud base of 500 feet to zero. At a meeting early on 4 June Eisenhower postponed the assault for 24 hours, because the air forces would not be able to support the landings. Convoys already at sea were recalled; one of them, Force U2A, missed the signal and had to be turned back by two destroyers and an aircraft.9 › Dwight D. Eisenhower
The bridges at midnight
C. P. Stacey writes that, in terms of the actual assault, the invasion "may be said to have commenced at 11:31 p.m. on 5 June", when RAF Bomber Command began its attack on the coastal batteries.10
Pathfinders of the 101st Airborne Division began dropping at 0015 and appear to have been the first Allied soldiers in France. On the British flank a coup de main force of the 2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and Royal Engineers, in six gliders, came down beside the bridges over the Caen Canal and the Orne shortly after midnight. The bridges were rushed and captured intact. The sixth glider landed seven or eight miles away.11
The 9th Parachute Battalion had to put the Merville battery out of action before dawn. Its men were so badly scattered that the commanding officer could gather only about 150 of them. He attacked anyway; the guns were silenced, at the cost of about half of the attackers.12
Across the 6th Airborne Division the drop was badly scattered: Ellis estimates that no more than 60 percent of the 4,800 men landed could join the first operations, and the Airborne Assault Museum that only 40 percent could form up for the initial tasks. The American drops in the Cotentin were scattered too, and many men came down far from their drop zones. The landings that followed at dawn are told in D-Day, 1944: the longest day on the Normandy beaches.13
Also on 5 June: the Six-Day War, 1967
Early on 5 June 1967 war broke out between Israel and Egypt. Both the US President's Daily Brief and the British Foreign Secretary, George Brown, speaking in the House of Commons, reported Israeli air attacks on Egyptian airfields and heavy ground fighting along Israel's border with Egypt. Who had started it was not yet clear: Brown called the situation "still unclear", and in Washington Secretary of State Dean Rusk told President Johnson that he did not know yet.14
