You can listen to the day unfold as it did on the radio on June 6, 1944. My internet radio station is streaming the entire day's broadcast as it happened. Go to:
Posted on 06/06/2007 5:12:35 AM PDT by abb
On this day in 1944, Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower gives the go-ahead for largest amphibious military operation in history: Operation Overlord, code-named D-Day, the Allied invasion of northern France.
By daybreak, 18,000 British and American parachutists were already on the ground. At 6:30 a.m., American troops came ashore at Utah and Omaha beaches. At Omaha, the U.S. First Division battled high seas, mist, mines, burning vehicles-and German coastal batteries, including an elite infantry division, which spewed heavy fire. Many wounded Americans ultimately drowned in the high tide. British divisions, which landed at Gold, and Sword beaches, and Canadian troops, landing at Juno beach, also met with heavy German fire, but by the end of the day they were able to push inland.
Despite the German resistance, Allied casualties overall were relatively light. The United States and Britain each lost about 1,000 men, and Canada 355. Before the day was over, 155,000 Allied troops would be in Normandy. However, the United States managed to get only half of the 14,000 vehicles and a quarter of the 14,500 tons of supplies they intended on shore.
Three factors were decisive in the success of the Allied invasion. First, German counterattacks were firm but sparse, enabling the Allies to create a broad bridgehead, or advanced position, from which they were able to build up enormous troop strength. Second, Allied air cover, which destroyed bridges over the Seine, forced the Germans to suffer long detours, and naval gunfire proved decisive in protecting the invasion troops. And third, division and confusion within the German ranks as to where the invasion would start and how best to defend their position helped the Allies. (Hitler, convinced another invasion was coming the next day east of the Seine River, refused to allow reserves to be pulled from that area.)
Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, commander of Britain's Twenty-first Army Group (but under the overall command of General Eisenhower, for whom Montgomery, and his ego, proved a perennial thorn in the side), often claimed later that the invasion had come off exactly as planned. That was a boast, as evidenced by the failure to take Caen on the first day, as scheduled. While the operation was a decided success, considering the number of troops put ashore and light casualties, improvisation by courageous and quick-witted commanders also played an enormous role.
The D-Day invasion has been the basis for several movies, from The Longest Day (1962), which boasted an all-star cast that included Richard Burton, Sean Connery, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum-and Fabian, to Saving Private Ryan (1998), which includes some of the most grippingly realistic war scenes ever filmed, captured in the style of the famous Robert Capa still photos of the actual invasion.
Amazing...notice that the word “quagmire” doesn’t appear in the article..despite the 3,000 KIA, and the “failure” to land only half of the needed material.
I’m putting The Longest Day on when I get home tonight.
One day’s battle in WWI on the western front - OVER 1,000,000 (ONE MILLION) DEAD!!!! IN ONE DAY!!!!
For the people who have lost sons and daughters, yes it is a tragedy. But taken overall, in context, the casualty list is amazingly small.
I’m putting on The Longest Yard....ooops, the wrong longest!
That depends... is it the original Longest Yard, with Burt Reynolds, or the remake of Longest Yard, also with Burt Reynolds?
On this day in history, my dad was with Mark Clark and the 5th Army helping to liberate the city of Rome from the Axis powers
Not quite. The Battle of Somme in WWI on July 1st 1916, the British suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 dead in 1 day. But by the end of the battle Feb 24 1917, their was over 1 million dead.
C'mon, I think that's a bit of a stretch.
Two of the deadliest battles of The Great War were Verdun and the Somme.
Verdun killed and wounded around a million, but that was over the course of nearly a year.
At the Somme, Britain's worst losses were 20,000 killed and 30,000 wounded on the first day. Ultimately, nearly a third of a million men combined (English, French and German) were killed and twice that many wounded.
The Great War was truly barbaric beyond words, but a million killed in one day? That's a stretch.
Channel 4 on XM is running their programming as if it was June 6, 1944, including breaking news interuptions, prayers by major religious leaders in the US and the like. Kind of amazing to hear the announcer talking about prayers, God, and NBC, all at once.
God bless your father - we owe him and his a debt that we can never repay.
My next-door neighbor passed away four years ago - on this day, 1944, he was in a landing craft, going ashore at Normandy. I made sure that my daughter got to meet him, got to hear some of his experiences, and got a better understanding of what that generation did for those of us that weren’t born yet.
You can listen to the day unfold as it did on the radio on June 6, 1944. My internet radio station is streaming the entire day's broadcast as it happened. Go to:
D-Day is what the first day of any amphibious landing was called.
The code name was Operation Overlord.
You'd think an educational channel would do the research to learn this.
I wonder how bad LBJ would have screwed this up if Pearl Harbor had happened and Churchill asked for help? For that matter, Eisenhower never would have been trusted to give the “go ahead” for the invasion. Probably the most important decision of the 20th century.
That said, it is a day to honor those who went ashore on that fateful day in 1944 and literally saved the world from the despotism and insanity of Hitler and the Third Reich. My Dad was among them, in the 79th Infantry that went ashore on Utah beach. As much as I'd ask him, he'd never talk about it, except once, when I asked him what he saw as he waded ashore in the choppy and chilly surf, he said "Debris and bodies." Not the kind of thing one wants to recall, I imagine.
BTT
Historic amnesia bump.
That's a strange and unhistorical comment. If the Free world was indeed resigned to defeat then it would have been defeated in 1940.
Half the forces at D-Day were Canadian, UK or 'Commonwealth' (India, Australia and many others). Half the forces in Italy on 6th June were Canadian, UK or Commonwealth, also Polish and French. Most of the forces in Burma were UK or Commonwealth. The only thing the Free World were resigned to was a long struggle.
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