Download dday stuff - Mount Holyoke College

http://www.deutscher-nationalismus.de/weltkrieg/images/d-day-2.jpg boat in water soldiers to shore
http://eatonvillenews.net/images/Bob/D%20DAY%20WOUNDED%20(Use)%20dday35.jpg soldiers
wounded
http://www.seniorweb.nl/images/D-day%20jpeg.jpg soldiers running onto beach
http://www.leavenworth.army.mil/milrev/Spanish/SepOct01/images/D%20Day%20on%20the%20beach.j
pg walking inland
http://img.www.france.com/gallery/archive/d-day-beach.jpg d-day beach
http://history.grand-forks.k12.nd.us/ndhistory/LessonImages/Sources/Pictures/d-day%203.jpg soldiers
walking in water
http://www.highrock.com/JohnGBurkhalter/beachlanding_b.jpg beach landing crouching
http://www.americaslibrary.gov/assets/aa/eisenhower/aa_eisenhower_dday_1_e.jpg black and white
beach landing
http://www.exibart.com/foto/29852.jpg soldiers swimming
http://www.wrangler4you.com/images/D-Day1944.jpg amphibious
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/s100000/s189924.jpg dead soldiers omaha beach
http://www.dwightdeisenhower.com/ddayphotos/65x325x3.jpg eisenhower and soldiers
http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/images/ike-montgomery.jpg eisenhower and mont. On dday
http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/Gallery/dday/images/omaha.jpg after dday omaha
http://images.usatoday.com/news/_photos/2004/06/03/d-day-graves.jpg d-day graves
http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/reference/Normandy/Pictures.htm normandy beach after dday
http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/reference/Normandy/Images/SC189921-S.JPG after dday inland
dday map from encarta
How to cite this article:
"D-Day Invasion," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2005
http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2005 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
© 1993-2005 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Intro
D-Day Invasion or Invasion of Normandy, the 1944 Allied assault on Nazioccupied northern Europe that assembled the largest force in the history of amphibious
warfare and represented a major turning point in World War II (1939-1945). The Allied
forces consisted of 20 U.S. divisions, 14 British divisions, 3 Canadian divisions, a French
division, and a Polish division. On the first day of the invasion, June 6, about 120,000 Allied
troops landed at five beach locations along the coast of the French province of Normandy
after crossing the English Channel from bases in southern England. The Allies faced a force
of about 50,000 Germans and suffered nearly 5,000 casualties on the first day alone but
succeeded in securing the beaches from which they launched their offensive. Many
historians consider the D-Day invasion the greatest military achievement of the 20th
century.
The expression “D-Day” was not coined for the Allied invasion. The same name was given to
the attack date of nearly every planned offensive during World War II. It was first coined
during World War I (1914-1918), before the massive United States attack at the Battle of
Saint-Mihiel in France. The “D” was short for day. The expression literally meant “Day-day.”
It signified the day of an attack. By the end of World War II, however, the expression was
synonymous with only one date: June 6, 1944.
Origins
In spring 1942, just months after the United States entered the war raging in Europe,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt informed Soviet premier Joseph Stalin that he expected the
formation of a second front against Germany that very year. At that point the only front
against the Germans was the eastern front in which Soviet forces were fighting German and
other Axis forces that had driven deep into the territory of the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR). Roosevelt’s assurance proved wishful thinking, but it was the best the
United States could offer the USSR, which was confronting the concentrated might of the
German Army, known as the Wehrmacht. Russians were dying by the hundreds of
thousands, and Roosevelt knew that a Soviet defeat meant the end of any meaningful
resistance to the juggernaut led by German dictator Adolf Hitler.
In 1942 United States military leaders were pressing their British allies for an attack across
the English Channel into occupied France by spring 1943. As the ferocious Battle of
Stalingrad raged in late 1942, U.S. officials pressured the British to prepare for the invasion
of France. The motive was to siphon German military strength away from the USSR.
Reluctantly, the British agreed to a plan called Operation Roundup, scheduled for 1943. But
later, the British demonstrated that Allied forces did not yet have the massive forces, ships,
landing craft, and supplies needed for a cross-channel invasion. The British shifted the Allied
focus from France to an attack on German forces in North Africa and an eventual invasion of
Italy, Germany’s ally, from the Mediterranean Sea.
Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill tried to appease a furious Stalin by
increasing lend-lease aid to the USSR and calling for Germany’s “unconditional surrender.”
The call for an unconditional surrender was meant to assure Stalin that Britain and the
United States would never agree to a separate, negotiated peace agreement with Germany.
For Stalin, all this was window dressing. What he needed was a second front to relieve his
blood-drained nation from the German onslaught.
The subsequent Allied victory in North Africa in May 1943 delayed the D-Day invasion in
France by a year and affected it in another way as well. German field marshal Erwin
Rommel, the respected strategist known as the “Desert Fox,” had lost North Africa, but in
Germany he was still regarded as a hero. Hitler ordered Rommel to inspect fortifications
along the Atlantic coast from the French border with Spain to the Dutch border with
Germany: the defense installation known as the Atlantic Wall.
The Nazis were well aware that the Allies were considering an invasion across the English
Channel, so Rommel was soon given direct responsibility for defending northern France,
Belgium, and Holland against an Allied landing. It was a job better suited to a spider, who
could spin a web and wait for prey, than to a fox, at his best on the move as he was as a
commander of a tank corps in North Africa. Rommel diligently made improvements to
fortifications along the coast and tried to anticipate the Allies’ next move.
Until the spring of 1943, the Allies were unsure when a cross-channel invasion might be
possible. An effective planning team under British lieutenant general Sir Frederick E. Morgan
started analyzing the possibilities in March 1943. In the meantime, the United States
continued to press its impatience upon the British. They did so not through diplomacy but
through massive deployment of troops and supplies.
By June 1943 German U-boats had been largely defeated by Allied antisubmarine sea and
air patrols and had withdrawn from the North Atlantic where they had taken a merciless toll
on U.S. merchant ships carrying supplies to Britain. After the defeat of the U-boats, the sea
lane was largely safe for the flow of supplies and equipment from the United States to
supply depots throughout Britain. Certain locations in Britain became one large staging area,
with tanks lined up in rows literally by the mile, and fighter planes disappearing into the
distance like some sort of abstract painting. D-Day was obviously coming, but it awaited a
firm plan and the commanders to carry it out.
Finally, in late November 1943, a course was set at the Tehrān Conference between
Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in Iran, where the British finally concurred with the Soviets
and the Americans that the time had come for the invasion. A D-Day offensive in Europe
had become an imperative. At Tehrān, the three Allied leaders formally agreed to go on the
offensive on the western front. “The history of war does not know an undertaking
comparable to it for breadth of conception, grandeur of scale, and mastery of execution,”
Stalin later claimed. The strategy had to encompass two major challenges: to cross some
hundred miles of open water with a vast army and then fight a battle on a scale never
attempted before.
Preparations
Britain and the United States agreed that the supreme commander for the invasion would
be an American, and Roosevelt chose U.S. Army general Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Allied
ground forces commander for the D-Day invasion, which was code named Operation
Overlord, was British general Bernard Montgomery. The broad outline of the attack was
relatively simple: find suitable beaches, gather a landing force, isolate the battlefield by
attacking bridges, tunnels, and rail networks so that the German defenders could not be
easily reinforced, and land the troops. Once a beachhead was established, the plan was to
pour in the supplies needed to sustain an offensive and then break out into the French
countryside. Executing the plan was not so simple. Crossing the treacherous English
Channel with its unexpected storms, enormous tides, and tricky currents would be just the
first step of the amphibious assault.
The attack on Fortress Europe, as it was known, required the utmost secrecy. The
assembling force was isolated in southern England to prevent details of the plan from
leaking out, and deceptive measures were taken to mislead the Germans about the
intended landing site. The deceptive measures included phony tanks and landing craft,
some made of cardboard, plywood, or rubber, and a dummy oil tank farm near Dover, the
English town closest to the European mainland and just opposite the city of Calais, France.
This elaborate effort was intended to make the Germans believe that the invasion would
come from Dover. The effort was so successful that Germany kept its main forces in the
Pas-de-Calais region even after the invasion took place, as Hitler feared that the Normandy
invasion was only a feint and the main invasion was yet to come.
The Allied planners focused on the beaches around Caen and the Cotentin Peninsula in
northern France rather than those of Calais, even though it meant the force would be
crossing at a wider part of the English Channel. That disadvantage was far outweighed by
what the site offered: comparatively scanty defensive fortifications and beachhead ideally
suited for successful exits. The clincher was an isolated battlefield that the Germans would
have difficulty reinforcing.
The date was set for May 1, 1944, to allow for a dawn invasion at low tide, when beach
obstacles that could impede the landing craft would be visible. But it soon became apparent
that the May 1 date would find the Allies still short of the landing craft necessary to mount
the great invasion. Reluctantly, Eisenhower reset D-Day to the next suitable date—June 5,
1944. The force continued to assemble as British, Canadian, and American soldiers flooded
into southern England. The Allies planned to put 5 divisions on the beaches for an initial
assault against a defending German force of 50 infantry and 11 armored divisions stationed
in France. The average German division had about 10,000 soldiers.
Invasion begins
A storm forced postponement to June 6, so it was just before midnight on June 5 that more
than 20,000 Allied airborne troops parachuted into France. Their mission was to seize and
hold the bridges and roads the Germans could use to move to the battlefields once the great
amphibious maneuvers began. The British airborne landed on the left of the invasion area;
the American on the right. Both drops suffered from scattering, particularly of the U.S.
paratroopers, because of enemy ground fire and a lack of navigational aids. The troops had
to locate one another and then move and fight in small groups, many unrelated by unit,
rather than in organized battle formations as planned. The one advantage of this scattering
was that it confused the enemy, who had great difficulty determining the size and scope of
the invading force. By the end of D-Day, the exits from the beaches and the entrances to
the battle area were both held by the Allies.
The assault beaches were named, from west to east, Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword.
The Americans landed at Omaha and Utah, the Canadians at Juno, and the British at Gold
and Sword. America’s forces included the 1st, 4th, and 29th Infantry Divisions, and the
82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. The British sent their 3rd and 50th Infantry Divisions
and 6th Airborne Division, while the Canadians used their 3rd Infantry Division. Shortly after
6 AM the invasion rolled ashore. At Sword, Gold, and Utah, enemy resistance was relatively
light, and the Allied forces had considerable success; on Utah Beach, for example, U.S.
soldiers moved rapidly up roadways leading from the beach to join some of the airborne
troops.
At Juno, meanwhile, the invading Canadians faced a beach littered with partially submerged
obstacles. Landing craft were forced to feel their way in. The troops waded ashore and
zigzagged through the obstacles, but German mines took a heavy toll. In the first hour of
the invasion at Juno, 50 percent of the Canadian assault team members became casualties.
The savagery peaked at Omaha Beach, the largest of the Overlord assault areas, where the
Germans had built formidable defenses and heavily mined the waters and the sand. Their
weapons were fixed to cover the beach with spraying fire from three directions. Omaha was
designed to be a killing zone.
West of Omaha beach, a promontory known as Pointe du Hoc jutted into the English
Channel. The promontory provided an elevated vantage point from which huge German
guns could fire upon both Omaha and Utah beaches. Intelligence and photo reconnaissance
had identified six 155-mm guns in casemates (defensive structures made of concrete) on
the point. The Allied command knew Omaha was the key to the fate of the landings.
The task of neutralizing the German guns fell to the U.S. Army Second Ranger Battalion.
Three companies landed at Pointe du Hoc at 7:10 AM and began scaling the cliffs to engage
the Germans on top in a heavy firefight. Within minutes of the landing the first Ranger was
up the cliff; then the others fought their way in small groups to the casemates, only to find
the 155-mm guns removed. The Rangers moved forward, sending a two-man patrol down a
narrow road leading south, where they discovered some guns 500 yards from the
crewmates. The two Americans quickly put the guns out of action with special thermite
grenades, handheld incendiary devices that soldiers used to destroy equipment. Shortly
after 9 AM the Army Rangers on Pointe du Hoc had accomplished their mission. The cost was
half their fighting force.
At Omaha Beach itself everything went wrong. Most of the tanks launched to support the
infantry sank. With few exceptions, units did not land where planned because strong winds
and tidal currents had scattered the boats in all directions. Throughout the landing the
formidable German defensive positions showered deadly fire upon the ranks of invading
Americans. Bodies and damaged craft littered the sand. Men seeking refuge behind
obstacles pondered the deadly sprint across the beach to the seawall, which offered at last
some protection at the base of the cliff.
Significance
Most historians regard D-Day as the turning point of World War II. There were certainly
other pivotal moments: moments when great battles were won or important decisions made.
But in sheer magnitude of accomplishments, nothing compared to D-Day. Churchill deemed
it “the most difficult and most complicated operation ever to take place.” That was saying a
lot. For it was a rare day during the war when something crucial did not transpire
somewhere in the Pacific, Burma-India-China, the Middle East, North Africa, the Soviet
Union, the North Atlantic, or Europe.
D-Day represented a turning point of a different sort. For the first time land conquered by the
Nazis was taken back for democracy. It was only a narrow strip of sea-sprayed beach, but it was
land, hard-fought for, and it was the beginning of the end for Hitler. “In the column I want to tell
you what the opening of the second front entailed,” Stars and Stripes’ reporter Ernie Pyle wrote
shortly after D-Day, “so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to
those both dead and alive who did it for you.”