Remembrance: D-Day + 75 Years

U.S. soldiers wade ashore at Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944. Photo Credit: U.S. Coast Guard 

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force: You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. 

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to victory!

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle.

We will accept nothing less than full victory!

Good luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

—Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, 6 June 1944.

Seventy-five years ago today, an assault force of 175,000 American, British, Canadian, and Free French forces, supported by an armada of 5,000 ships (including over 700 warships ranging in size from PT boats to battleships) and thousands of bombers, fighter-bombers, and fighters providing air cover, stormed ashore on five beaches (code-named UTAH, OMAHA, GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD) along a 45-mile-long stretch of the Normandy coast in German-occupied France. The first wave of this invasion, which was code-named Operation Overlord, comprised a small fraction of that vast host: roughly around 6,000 assault troops from the U.S. 4th, 1st, and 29th Infantry Divisions, the British 3rd and 50th Infantry Divisions, and the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division, plus various special forces units from the 2nd Ranger Battalion, beachmasters, combat engineers, naval gunfire support officers, and other specialists. Thousands of more men and their equipment and vehicles followed in later waves.

Four years ago our nation and empire stood alone against an overwhelming enemy, with our backs to the wall. . . . Now once more a supreme test has to be faced. This time the challenge is not to fight to survive but to fight to win the final victory for the good cause. . . .

At this historic moment surely not one of us is too busy, too young, or too old to play a part in a nation-wide, perchance a world-wide vigil of prayer as the great crusade sets forth.

          —King George VI, radio address, 6 June 1944.

The seaborne landings were preceded by the nighttime airdrop of three Allied airborne divisions: the American 82nd and 101st on the western end of the invasion area, the British 6th on the eastern flank. Their mission: to secure the flanks of the landing zone, capture bridges on the Orne River in the Anglo-Canadian sector, destroy German batteries that could zero in on the beaches, and create chaos and confusion among the defenders. In all, 24,000 paratroopers landed on Normandy via parachute or gliders during the pre-dawn hours of D-Day. The British and Canadian drop went relatively smoothly; the Americans were hampered by the vagaries of weather (the transport planes ran into an unexpected cloud bank which affected pilots' visibility and caused them to break formation), enemy anti-aircraft fire, and the geography of the target area (a narrow peninsula called the Cotentin which was deliberately flooded by the German defenders to forestall an airborne assault).

This is the end for Germany.

—Maj. Werner Pluskat, 352d Infantry Division at dawn on 6 June.

As often happens in war, things did not go exactly according to plan. The massive aerial bombardment that was supposed to stun the German defenders and create craters (instant foxholes, you might say) for the seaborne troops did neither; afraid that their bombs would hit the Allied ships and landing craft, many bombardiers delayed releasing their deadly cargo by as much as 30 seconds or more. This meant that bombs that were supposed to fall on German positions on the coast or on the beaches actually fell dozens of miles inland, killing unlucky French civilians and lots of Norman cows instead.

Also, the naval bombardment of the beaches only lasted 30 minutes to an hour, allegedly to achieve tactical surprise in the invasion area. Some officers who had served in the Pacific had suggested a longer shelling of the beaches by the Eastern and Western Task Forces; they were summarily dismissed by their European Theater of Operations colleagues.

As a result, the first waves to hit the beaches, especially at Omaha, were met by a fierce hail of enemy fire that decimated entire companies at a time in some sectors. In fact, things at Omaha Beach looked so dire that Gen. Omar Bradley, commanding the U.S. First Army, considered stopping the landings there and sending the succeeding waves to either Utah Beach or the Anglo-Canadian beaches. Eventually, though, the men of the U.S. 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions, aided by U.S. Navy destroyers and their deadly naval gunfire support, clawed out a beachhead and pushed the German defenders inland, but at a heavy cost in men and equipment: over 1,000 men lost their lives at "Bloody Omaha," the toughest of the five invasion beaches.

I'm not going to delve too deeply into the details of the D-Day experience; far better writers than I have written entire books about the events of June 6, 1944 and the campaigns that freed Western Europe from Nazi domination. Likewise, many films (some good, some not) have been made about what German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the German commander of Army Group B, famously stated would be "the longest day" for both the Allies as well as the Germans.

The first twenty-four hours of the invasion will be decisive. . . . [T]he fate of Germany depends on the outcome. For the Allies as well as Germany, it will be the longest day.

—Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, 22 April 1944.

Nor am I going to drown the reader in any more raw facts or bits of trivia, except to remind you that if we aren't living in a world dominated by a Nazi-ruled Europe with a militaristic, authoritarian, and racist Third Reich at its core, we can thank all of the men and women who worked hard, both on the home front and on the battlefronts, to plan, prepare for, and carry out Operation Overlord. We owe a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid in full to those millions of people, civilian or military, who served the Allied cause and helped pave the way to the eventual defeat of Adolf Hitler and his regime of evil.

Photo Credit: Peter K. Burian, WikiMedia Commons

We also owe it to the 10,000 Allied casualties - especially the 4,414 confirmed dead - of those crucial 24 hours in which the fate of Western Europe still hung on the balance. It would be tragic if, three-quarters of a century after the forever-young men of D-Day paid the ultimate sacrifice so that our generation would not live in tyranny, democracy died in darkness due to the forces of nationalism, authoritarianism, and xenophobia.