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| Contents | ||
| Battle of Normandy | |||||||||||||||||
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| Conflict | World War II, Western Front | ||||||||||||||||
| Date | June 6, 1944 – August 22, 1944 | ||||||||||||||||
| Place | Normandy, France | ||||||||||||||||
| Result | Allied victory | ||||||||||||||||
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The Battle of Normandy was fought in 1944 between the German forces occupying Western Europe and the invading Allies. Sixty years later, the Normandy invasion, codenamed Operation Overlord, remains the largest seaborne invasion in history, involving almost three million troops crossing the English ChannelThe English Channel is the part of the Atlantic Ocean that separates the island of Great Britain from northern France, and joins the North Sea to the Atlantic. In French it is called La Manche ("the sleeve"). It is about 350 miles long and at its widest i from EnglandEngland is the largest, the most populous, and the most densely populated of the four " Home Nations" which make up the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK). Occupying the south-eastern portion of the island of Great Britain, England to Normandy in occupied France.
The Normandy invasion began with overnight paratrooperParatroopers are soldiers trained in parachuting and formed into an airborne force. Paratroopers have a tactical advantage in that they can appear on the battlefield anywhere that aircraft can fly over. Thus they can evade enemy fortifications designed to and glider landings, massive air and naval bombardments, and an early-morning amphibious assault. The battle for Normandy continued for more than two months, with campaigns to establish, expand, and eventually break out of the Allied beachheads. It concluded with the surrender of Paris and the fall of the Chambois pocket.
Normandy is one of the best-known battles of World War II. " D-Day" is still used to refer to the starting date of the invasion, and the opening day of the Battle of Normandy: June 6, 1944.
After the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union ( Operation Barbarossa), the Soviets had done the bulk of the fighting against Germany on the European mainland. U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had committed the United States and United Kingdom to opening up a "second front" in Europe to ease the desperate Soviet situation, initially in 1942, and again in spring 1943.
Rather than repeat the head-on frontal assaults of World War I, the British, and Churchill in particular, favoured attacking the peripheries of western Europe and allowing the insurgency work of the SOE to come to widespread fruition, while making a main Allied thrust from the Mediterranean to Vienna and into Germany from the south. Such an approach was believed to also offer the advantage of creating a barrier to limit the Soviet advance into Europe. However, the U.S. believed from the onset that the optimum approach was the shortest route to Germany emanating from the strongest Allied power base. They were adamant in their view and made it clear that it was the only option they would support in the long term. Two preliminary proposals were drawn up: Operation Sledgehammer for an invasion in 1942, and Operation Roundup for a larger attack in 1943, which was adopted and became Operation Overlord, although it was delayed until 1944.
The process of planning was started in earnest in January 1943 by the staff of SHAEF.
On April 28, 1944, in south Devon on the English coast, 749 U.S. soldiers and sailors were killed when German torpedo boats surprised a D-Day landing exercise, Exercise Tiger.
The small operating range of Allied fighters, including the British Spitfire and Hawker Typhoon, from UK airfields greatly limited the choices of landing sites. Geography reduced the choices further to two sites: the Pas de Calais and the Normandy coast. While the Pas de Calais offered the shortest distance from the UK, the best landing beaches and the most direct overland route to Germany, it was for those reasons the expected invasion point, and thus the most heavily fortified and defended. Consequently, the Allies chose Normandy for the invasion.
Largely because of the lessons learned in the disastrous 1942 Canadian raid on Dieppe, the Allies also decided not to directly assault a French seaport in their first landings. Landings in force on a broad front in Normandy would permit simultaneous threats against the port of Cherbourg, coastal ports further west in Brittany, and an overland attack towards Paris and towards the border with Germany. Normandy was a less-defended coast and an unexpected but strategic jumping-off point, with the potential to confuse and scatter the German defending forces.
It was not until December 1943 that General Dwight Eisenhower was named as Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force, effectively giving him overall charge of the Allied forces in Europe. In January 1944, General Bernard Montgomery was named as operational commander for the invasion ground forces.
At that stage the plan required sea landing by three divisions, with two brigades landed by air. Montgomery quickly increased the scale of the initial attack to five divisions by sea and three by air. In total, 47 divisions would be committed to the Battle of Normandy: 26 divisions of British, Canadian, Commonwealth and free European troops, and 21 American divisions.
More than 6000 vessels would be involved in the invasion under the command of Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, including 4000 landing craft and 130 warships for bombardment. 12,000 aircraft under Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory were to support the landings, including 1000 transports to fly in the parachute troops. 5000 tons of bombs would be dropped against the German defenses.
The objectives for the first 40 days were to:
The three month objective was to control a zone bound by the rivers Loire in the south and Seine in the north east.
In order to persuade the Germans that the invasion would really be coming to the Pas de Calais, the Allies prepared a massive deception plan, called Operation Fortitude. An entirely fictitious First U.S. Army Group was created, with fake buildings and equipment, and false radio messages were sent. General George Patton was even mentioned as the unit's commander. The Germans were eager to find the landing location, and had an extensive network of agents operating throughout Southern England. Unfortunately for them, every single one had been " turned" by the Allies, and was dutifully sending back messages confirming the Pas de Calais as the likely attack point. To keep the pretence running for as long as possible, the deception was continued into the battle, with air attacks on radar and other installations in the area.
Another deception, Operation Skye, was mounted from Scotland using radio traffic, designed to convince German traffic analysts that an invasion would be also mounted into Norway, or perhaps Denmark. German troops were retained in Norway against this phantom threat that would otherwise have been moved into France.
Some of the more unusual preparations by the Allies included armoured vehicles specially adapted for the assault. Developed under the leadership of Major-General Percy Hobart, these vehicles included "swimming" Duplex Drive Sherman tanks, mine clearing tank s (the Sherman Crab , a normal Sherman tank with a flail sticking out on the front that destroyed all mines without damage to the tank), bridge-laying tank s and road-laying tank s. Some prior testing of these vehicles had been undertaken at Kirkham Priory in Yorkshire, England.
The plan also called for the construction of two artificial Mulberry Harbours in order to get vital supplies to the invading forces in the first few weeks of the battle in the absence of deep water ports, and Operation PLUTO (Pipe Line Under The Ocean) a series of submarine pipes that would deliver fuel from Britain to the invading forces.