NORMANDY INVASION

also called Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of western Europe that began on June 6, 1944. As the tide of battle in World War II began to turn in favour of the Allies, the U.S. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower had the task of forming the largest invasion fleet in history in order to effect an amphibious landing on the northern coast of France. If successful, the landing would be the starting point for a massive Allied thrust eastward through France and on into the heart of Nazi Germany. While the invasion plans were being formed by American and British commanders in England, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the German commander charged with resisting the expected invasion, was strengthening the German defensive fortifications on the coastline of France by the construction of underwater obstacles, bombproof bunkers, and minefields. The invasion of northern France from England was launched not in May, as its planners had initially prescribed, but on June 6, the famous D-Day of World War II. A huge armada had been assembled, including 1,200 fighting ships, 10,000 planes, 4,126 landing craft, 804 transport ships, and hundreds of amphibious and other special purpose tanks. During the operation 156,000 troops (73,000 U.S. and 83,000 British or Canadian) were landed in Normandy, 132,500 of them seaborne across the English Channel, 23,500 airborne. The beaches chosen for the landings stretched from the estuary of the Orne to the southeastern edge of the Cotentin peninsula, with the British and Canadians taking the eastern beaches and the Americans the western. The ground forces for the initial assault, under British Gen. Sir Bernard Montgomery's direction, comprised: (1) the Canadian 1st Army under Lieut. Gen. H.D.G. Crerar, the British 2nd Army under Lieut. Gen. Sir Miles Dempsey, and the British 6th Airborne division; and (2) the U.S. 1st Army and the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions under Lieut. Gen. Omar N. Bradley. Delayed 24 hours by bad Channel weather, the invasion began before dawn on June 6 with units of the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions making night landings near the town of Sainte-Mre-glise, while British commando units captured key bridges and knocked out Nazi communications. In the morning, the assault troops of the combined Allied armies landed at five beaches along the Normandy coast code-named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. While four beaches were taken easily and quickly, the forces landing at Bloody Omaha encountered stiff German resistance. By nightfall, sizable beachheads had been secured on all five landing areas, and the final campaign to defeat Germany was under way. The Allies' supremacy in the air was pivotal. Their air forces destroyed most of the bridges over the Seine to the east and the Loire to the south, thus preventing the Germans from quickly reinforcing their beleaguered forward units at the beachheads. In the original plan, the British forces were to take Caen on the first day of the landing. The coastal defenses were overcome by 9 AM, but the advance inland to Caen did not start until afternoon, partly because of a paralyzing traffic jam on the beaches and partly because of the excessive caution of the commanders on the spot. When they eventually pushed on toward Caen, a Panzer (tank) divisionthe only one in the invasion areaarrived and checked their progress. A second Panzer division came up the next day. More than a month of heavy fighting passed before Caen was at last secured and cleared on July 9. In the western sector, meanwhile, the Americans faced serious resistance in the Cotentin but finally took the crucial port of Cherbourg on June 27. The Germans' main handicap was their need to cover 3,000 miles (4,800 km) of western European coastline, from The Netherlands around the coast of France to the Italian mountain frontier. Their 59 divisions in Western Europe were of a static type and were anchored to sectors of that long coastline. But the other half were field divisions, and of these the ten Panzer divisions were highly mobile. Thus the Germans had the capability of concentrating overwhelming superiority to throw the invaders back into the sea before they became established. However, any such strong and prompt counterstroke was frustrated by discord in the German high command, both about the probable site of the invasion and about the best method of meeting it. Before the event, Hitler's intuition proved better than his generals' calculation in gauging where the Allies would land. After the landing, his continual interference and rigid control deprived his generals of the chance of retrieving the situation and eventually enabled the Allied forces to break out of their initially confined position and begin their rapid sweep across France.