D-Day

1. In 1941 the United States entered a large war which history refers to as World War II. The war had two sides - the ALLIED Powers, which consisted of The US, Soviet Union and the United Kingdom of Great Britain, and the AXIS Powers, which consisted of Italy, Germany and Japan. Early in the war the AXIS powers took over much of Europe. In 1944, the ALLIED Powers decided to try to recapture Europe starting in France. They planned an invasion of the country which was called Operation Overlord or D-Day.

2. D-Day.  Soon after the evacuation of Dunkerque in 1940, Great Britain started to plan a return to France.  In 1942, the United States and Britain began to discuss a large-scale invasion across the English Channel.  That summer, the Allies raided the French port of Dieppe on the channel.  The raiders met strong German defenses and suffered heavy losses.  The Dieppe raid convinced the Allies that landing on open beaches had a better chance of success than landing in a port.

3. Throughout 1943, preparations moved ahead for an invasion of northern France the following year.  The invasion plan received the code name Operation Overlord.  The Allies assembled huge amounts of equipment and great numbers of troops for Overlord in southern England.  General Dwight D. Eisenhower was selected to command the invasion.

4. The Germans expected an Allied invasion along the north coast of France in 1944.  But they were unsure where.  A chain of fortifications, which the Germans called the Atlantic Wall, ran along the coast.  Hitler placed Rommel in charge of strengthening German defenses along the English Channel.  Rommel brought in artillery, mined the water and the beaches, and strung up barbed wire.  The Germans concentrated their troops near Calais, at the narrowest part of the English Channel.  But the Allies planned to land farther west, in a region of northern France called Normandy.

5. Eisenhower chose Monday, June 5, 1944, as D-Day--the date of the Normandy invasion.  Rough seas forced him to postpone D-Day until June 6.  During the night, about 2,700 ships carrying landing craft and 176,000 soldiers crossed the channel.  Minesweepers had gone ahead to clear the water.  Paratroopers dropped behind German lines to capture bridges and railroad tracks.  At dawn, battleships opened fire on the beaches.  At 6:30 A.M., troops from the United States, Britain, Canada, and France stormed ashore on a 60-mile (100-kilometer) front in the largest seaborne invasion in history.

6. D-Day took the Germans by surprise.  But they fought back fiercely.  At one landing site, code-named Omaha Beach, U.S. troops came under heavy fire, and experienced bloody fighting, and barely managed to stay ashore.  Nevertheless, all five Allied landing beaches were secure by the end of D-Day.  The Allies soon had an artificial harbor in place for unloading more troops and supplies.  A pipeline carried fuel across the channel.  By the end of June 1944, about a million Allied troops had reached France.

7. The Allied forces advanced slowly at first.  The Americans struggled westward to capture the badly needed port of Cherbourg.  British and Canadian soldiers fought their way to Caen.  The battle for Cherbourg ended on June 27.  Caen, which the British hoped to capture on D-Day, fell on July 18.  Near the end of July, the Allies finally broke through German lines into open country.