How to Understand D-Day

It’s one of the ironies of history that the “D” in “D-Day”—which commemorates the Allied invasion of France on June 6, 1944—doesn’t really stand for anything special. (In military parlance, “D” actually means “day”—but somehow “Day Day” doesn’t sound appropriately respectful.) In any event, here’s a recap of those fateful few weeks in early summer that turned the tide of the European war.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. Everyone knew a European invasion was inevitable. It’s not true that the allied invasion caught Adolf Hitler completely by surprise; the Nazis were well aware that the Allies had to attempt to reconquer Europe sooner or later. It’s possible, though, that mired as he was in war on his Eastern front—a result of his ill-considered decision to invade Russia in 1941—Hitler didn’t expect the Allies to come to Stalin’s aid by diverting the attention of Nazi forces.
2. The Allies maintained strict secrecy. Although the Nazis expected an Allied invasion, they didn’t know where or when it would happen. In the months leading up to D-Day, Allied intelligence planted rumors of an invasion of southern (rather than northern) France, as a result of which key Nazi divisions were hundreds of miles away from the Allied landings in early June.
3. The Allied invasion fleet was the largest in history. The Normandy invasion involved almost 7,000 ships of all sizes, as well as about 12,000 aircrafts—and in the first two weeks, about 750,000 British and American soldiers had debarked on French soil over a 60-mile front. (As the front was slowly secured, over the next weeks and months, the Allies landed hundreds of thousands more soldiers.)
4. The battle fared differently on different beaches. Depending on German fortifications and state of readiness, some landings went relatively smoothly, while others were a nightmare. For example, British soldiers landed on Sword Beach relatively uneventfully, but Omaha Beach proved a bloodbath for the U.S. infantry, which incurred thousands of casualties in the first few hours of combat (as immortalized in Steven Spielberg’s film “Saving Private Ryan”).
5. The Allied forces didn’t break out until July 25. It’s not as if the Allies landed at Normandy, gathered their equipment, and started marching toward Berlin. History (and popular entertainment) has telescoped the D-Day invasion into a single day, but intense fighting continued on the beaches of Normandy for the next two months, and it wasn’t until late July that “Operation Cobra” saw the first sizeable breakout of Allied forces into the French interior.