D-Day: The Invasion of Normandy

D-Day: The Invasion of Normandy

When on D-Day-June 6, 1944-Allied armies landed in Normandy on the North-western coast of France, one of the most important events of World War II happened; the fate of Europe hung on the results of the invasion. If the invasion failed, the United States might turn its full attention to the enemy in the Pacific-Japan-leaving Britain alone, with most of its resources spent in mounting the invasion. That would enable Nazi Germany to gather all its strength against the Soviet Union. By the time American forces returned to Europe, Germany might have control of the entire continent.

Although fewer Allied ground troops went ashore on D-Day than on the first day of the earlier invasion of Sicily, the invasion of Normandy was in total history's greatest amphibious operation, involving on the first day 5,000 ships (the largest group of ships ever assembled), 11,000 planes, and about 154,000 British, Canadian and American soldiers, including 23,000 arriving by parachute and glider. The invasion also involved a long-range deception plan on a scale that the world had never before seen and the secret operations of tens of thousands of allied resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied countries of Western Europe.

American General Dwight D. Eisenhower was named supreme commander for the allies in Europe. British General, Sir Frederick Morgan, established a combined American-British headquarters known as COSSAC, for Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander. COSSAC developed a number of plans for the Allies; most notable was that of Operation Overlord, a full-scale invasion of France across the English Channel.

Eisenhower felt that COSSAC's plan was a sound operation. After reviewing the bad hit-and-run raid in 1942 in Dieppe, planners decided that the strength of German defenses required not a number of separate assaults by relatively small units but an immense concentration of power in a single main landing. The invasion site would have to be close to at least one major port and airbase to allow for efficient supply lines. Possible sites included among others, the

Pas de Calais across the Strait of Dover, and the beaches of Cotentin. The Allies decided that the beaches of Cotentin would be the landing sites for Operation Overlord.

The main reason that the invasion worked was deception. Deception to mislead the Germans as to the time and place of the invasion. To accomplish this, the British already had a plan known as Jael, which involved whispering campaigns in diplomatic posts around the world and various distractions to keep German eyes focused anywhere but on the coast of northwestern France. An important point to the deception was Ultra, code name for intelligence obtained from intercepts of German radio traffic. This was made possible by the British early in the war having broken the code of the standard German radio enciphering machine, the Enigma. Through Ultra the Allied high command knew what the Germans expected the Allies to do and thus could plant information either to reinforce an existing false view or to feed information through German agents, most of it false but enough of it true-and thus sometimes involving sacrifice of Allied troops, agents or resistance forces in occupied countries-to maintain the credibility of the German agents.

Six days before the targeted date of June 5th, troops boarded ships, transports, and aircraft

all along the southern and southwestern coasts of England. All was ready for one of history's most dramatic and momentous events. One important question was left unanswered though: what did the Germans know? Under Operation Fortitude, a fake American force-the 1st Army Group-assembled just across the Channel from the Pas de Calais. Dummy troops, false radio traffic, dummy landing crafts in the bay of the Thames river, huge but empty camps, and dummy tanks all contributed to the deception. Although the Allied commanders could not know it until their troops were ashore, their deception had been remarkably successful. As time for the invasion neared, the German's focus of the deception had shifted from the regions of the Balkans and Norway to the Pas de Calais. The concentration of Allied troops was so great, that an invasion of France seemed inevitable. Bombing attacks, sabotage by the French Resistance and false messages from compromised German agents all focused on the Pas