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- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Holocaust Encyclopedia - D-Day
- Official Site of the Utah Beach Museum
- BBC - D-Day: What happened during the Normandy landings of 1944?
- World War II Database - Normandy Campaign, Phase 1
- The Canadian Encyclopedia - D-Day and the Battle of Normandy
- The National WWII Museum - D-Day and the Normandy Campaign
- Naval History and Heritage Command - Normandy Invasion
- Warfare History Network - The D-Day Invasion: The Road to Operation Overlord
- National Army Museum - D-Day
- Ohio State University - "...it will be the longest day" Remembering D-Da
- Spartacus Educational - D-Day
- CNN World - What is D-Day? How the Normandy landings led to GermanyÂ’s defeat in World War II
- National Defense University Press - Why Normandy Still Matters: Seventy-Five Years On, Operation Overlord Inspires, Instructs, and Invites Us to Be Better Joint Warfighters
Normandy Invasion
- What was the Normandy Invasion?
- When and where did the Normandy Invasion happen?
- Which countries took part in the Normandy Invasion?
- Why did the Allies launch the Normandy Invasion?
- What happened on D-Day, the first day of the invasion?
- How did the Normandy Invasion influence the outcome of World War II?
Normandy Invasion, duringWorld War II, theAllied invasion of westernEurope, which was launched on June 6, 1944 (the most celebrated D-Day of the war), with thesimultaneous landing ofU.S.,British, andCanadian forces on five separate beachheads inNormandy,France. By the end of August 1944 all of northern France was liberated, and the invading forces reorganized for the drive intoGermany, where they would eventually meet with Soviet forces advancing from the east to bring an end to theNazi Reich.
Planning, 1941–43
Hitler’s Reich, east and west
In midsummer 1943, a year before the Anglo-American invasion ofNormandy that would lead to the liberation of western Europe,Adolf Hitler’sWehrmacht (“Armed Forces”) still occupied all the territory it had gained in theblitzkrieg campaigns of 1939–41 and most of its Russian conquests of 1941–42. It also retained its foothold on the coast ofNorth Africa,acquired when it had gone to the aid of its Italian ally in 1941. The Russian counteroffensives at theBattle of Stalingrad and theBattle of Kursk had pushed back the perimeter of Hitler’s Europe in the east. Yet he or his allies still controlled the whole of mainland Europe, except for neutralSpain,Portugal,Switzerland, andSweden. The Nazi war economy, though overshadowed by the growing power ofAmerica’s, outmatched both that ofBritain and that of theSoviet Union except in the key areas of tank and aircraft production. Without direct intervention by the western Allies on the Continent—an intervention that would centre on the commitment of a large American army—Hitler could count on prolonging his military dominance for years to come.
The second front
Since 1942 Soviet leaderJoseph Stalin had been pressing his allies, U.S. Pres.Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime MinisterWinston Churchill, to mount a second front in the west. It was impossible in the circumstances. America’s army was still forming, while thelanding craft necessary to bring such an army across theEnglish Channel had not yet been built. Nevertheless, Britain had begun to prepare theoretical plans for a return to the continental mainland soon after theretreat from Dunkirk, France, in 1940, and the Americans, immediately after Hitler declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, had started to frame their own timetable. Lessinhibited than the British by perceived technical difficulties, the Americans pressed from the start for an early invasion—desirably in 1943, perhaps even in 1942. To that endGeorge C. Marshall, Roosevelt’s chief of staff, appointed a protégé,Dwight D. Eisenhower, to the U.S. Army’s war plans division in December 1941 and commissioned him to design an operational scheme for Allied victory.
OperationsRoundup andSledgehammer
Swiftly convincing himself that the priority of “Germany first” agreed to by Roosevelt and Churchill in theAtlantic Charter was correct, Eisenhower framed proposals for a 1943 invasion (OperationRoundup) and another for 1942 (Operation Sledgehammer) in the event of a Russian collapse or a sudden weakening of Germany’s position. Both plans were presented to the British in London in April 1942, and Roundup was adopted. The British, nevertheless, reserved objective doubts, and at subsequent Anglo-American conferences—in Washington in June, in London in July—they first quashed all thought of Sledgehammer and then succeeded in persuading the Americans to agree to a North African landing as the principal operation of 1942.Operation Torch, as the landing in North Africa was to be code-named, effectively postponed Roundup again, while subsequent operations in Sicily and the Italian mainland delayed preparations for the cross-Channel invasion through 1943 as well. The postponements were a principal cause of concern at inter-Allied conferences at Washington (code-namedTrident, May 1943),Quebec (Quadrant, August 1943),Cairo (Sextant, November 1943), andTehrān (Eureka, November–December 1943). At the last gathering, Roosevelt and Stalincombined against Churchill to insist on the adoption of May 1944 as an unalterable date for the invasion. In return, Stalin agreed to mount a simultaneous offensive in eastern Europe and to join in the war against Japan once Germany had been defeated.
Operation Overlord
The decision taken at Tehrān was a final indication of American determination to stage the cross-Channel invasion; it was also a defeat forAlan Brooke, Churchill’s chief of staff and the principal opponent of premature action. Yet despite Brooke’s procrastination, the British had in fact been proceeding with structural plans, coordinated by Lieut. Gen.Frederick Morgan, who had been appointed COSSAC (chief of staff to the supreme Allied commander [designate]) at the Anglo-AmericanCasablanca Conference in January 1943. His staff’s first plan for Operation Overlord (as the invasion was henceforth to be known) was for a landing inNormandy betweenCaen and the Cotentin Peninsula in a strength of three divisions, with two brigades to be air-dropped. Another 11 divisions were to be landed within the first two weeks through two artificial harbours that would be towed across the Channel. Once a foothold had been established, a force of a hundred divisions, the majority shipped directly from the United States, were to be assembled in France for a final assault on Germany. In January 1944 Eisenhower became supreme Allied commander, and the COSSAC staff was redesignated SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force).
- Also called:
- Operation Overlord or D-Day
- Date:
- June 6, 1944 - July 9, 1944
- Participants:
- Allied powers
- Context:
- Vichy France
- World War II
Fortress Europe
Hitler had long been aware that the Anglo-American allies would eventuallymount a cross-Channel invasion, but, as long as they dissipated their forces in the Mediterranean and as long as the campaign in the east demanded the commitment of all available German forces, he downplayed the threat. By November 1943, however, he accepted that it could be ignored no longer, and in hisDirective Number 51 he announced that France would be reinforced. To oversee defensive preparations, Hitler appointed Field MarshalErwin Rommel, former commander of the Afrika Korps, as inspector of coastal defenses and then as commander of Army Group B, occupying the threatened Channel coast. As army group commander, Rommel officially reported to the longer-serving Commander in Chief WestGerd von Rundstedt, though the entire structure was locked into a rigidchain of command thatdeferred many operational decisions to the Führer himself.
