The D-Day Landings

The D-Day Landings

The Allied landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944 were among the most

desperate undertakings in the history of war. Amphibious operations

against an enemy in a strong defensive position will almost always

lead to heavy casualties.

In November 1943, the United States Marine Corps' capture of the tiny

atoll of Tarawa in the central Pacific had cost more than 3,000

casualties. American censors banned a public screening of the US Navy

film of this event, arguing that its shocking images of a lagoon red

with soldiers' blood would undermine the morale of US forces and the

Home Front.

The British and Canadians had suffered their own disaster at Dieppe on

18 August 1942. More than two thirds of a 6,000-man raiding force had

been left behind on the shingle beach, dead, wounded and prisoners.

On the eve of D-Day the Allied leadership was in a state of neurotic

anxiety. Just after midnight on 6 June, a restless Churchill, haunted

by memories of the disastrous Allied landings at Gallipoli 29 years

earlier, bade his wife goodnight with the words, 'Do you realise that

by the time you wake up in the morning twenty thousand men may have

been killed?'

The same night, the chief of the imperial general staff, General Alan

Brooke, confided to his diary that '... it may well be the most

ghastly disaster of the whole war. I wish to God it were safely over

'.

At about 22.00 the supreme allied commander, General Dwight

Eisenhower, had made an impromptu visit to paratroopers of the 101st

Airborne at Greenham Common airfield near Newbury. His driver, Kay

Summersby, recorded that the general, overwhelmed by emotion, climbed...

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...l Erwin Rommel, all beaches on which a

landing was considered possible had been festooned with belts of

obstacles and minefields, and covered by machine-gun and mortar

emplacements.

Further back, bunkers of enormous strength at Merville, Longues and

Pointe du Hoc on the Normandy coast enabled large-calibre German guns

to bombard a landing force. In order to frustrate an airborne attack,

German engineers flooded low-lying areas and strung wires across

fields to deter glider landings.

The Americans had come to Europe to finish the war as quickly as

possible, and this meant taking the shortest, most direct route to

Germany. However, the disaster at Dieppe and their own experiences in

the Pacific had qualified their optimism. Thus the D-Day landings were

to be the most highly planned operations in military history.