After more than a year of preparations, the most ambitious and decisive Allied assault of World War II came down to three simple words uttered by a commander in chief whose chain smoking and 15 cup-a-day coffee habit had driven his blood pressure perilously high.
The notoriously bad weather over the English Channel broke. And U.S. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, issued the order: "OK. Let's go."
D-Day was launched a half-century ago. After one false start, the final decision mas made to land June 6, 1944. Then, the "longest day" would begin.
A vast armada of 5,000 ships and over 800 aircraft carrying roughly 176,000 troops set off from England under troublesome skies and an uncertain outcome to liberate Europe in an adventure that would ultimately help defeat Nazi Germany.
They parachuted into places called Ste. Mere-Eglise and the Orne River. They landed in obscure fields and orchards. They swam, waded, and trudged ashore at beaches named Omaha, Utah and Juno on landing sites called Easy Red and Dog Green.
Omaha was the deadliest of them, and that was where the untried soldiers of Maryland and Virginia's 29th Division clambered ashore through a four-foot surf facing German fortifications atop 200 foot-high cliffs.
The Allies launched their fateful expedition full of anxiety. General Eisenhower's prepared official communique to the world confidently predicted success, but he carried in his pocket a statement scribbled on a piece of paper accepting blame for a colossal defeat.
Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, British chief of staff, predicted the invasion would fall short of expectations at best and, at worst, would be "the most ghastly failure of the whole war."
Commanding the U.S. ground troops, Maj. Gen. Omar N. Bradley, observing the landings from a vessel off the coast of Normandy, learned to his horror that hundreds of American troops were being mown down on the open, unprotected landing
sites at Omaha Beach. He contemplated retreat.
COURAGE OF DESPERATION
Indeed, by the time the sun set over Normandy on June 6, the Allies had suffered nearly 10,000 casualties. U.S. troops alone accounted for 6,603 dead, wounded and missing.
On the other side, Germany was taken by surprise, even though the invasion had long been anticipated. Many German commanders believed the Normandy assault was merely a diversion for the expected main invasion in the Pas-de-Calais.
Wherever the invasion came, German commanders fully comprehended its significance. Six weeks before the invasion, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commander of German forces in northern France, told his aide: ". . . the first 24 hours of the invasion will be important. . . . The fate of Germany depends on the outcome. . . . For the Allies as well as Germany, it will be the longest day."
At Adolf Hitler's alpine headquarters in Berchtesgaden, the German high command was afraid to awaken the Nazi leader to inform him of the landings. Rommel was at home in Germany celebrating his wife's birthday on the fateful day. Informed of the invasion by telephone, Rommel told his chief of staff: "How stupid of me."
In the ghastly carnage on Omaha Beach and in the deadly marshes and hedgerows where paratroopers had landed behind the beaches, sheer courage seemed to win the day for men who decided individually and collectively to move forward rather than retreat in the face of death.
Many memorable things were said that day, but the exhortation that seems to have captured the desperation of the event and what it would take to succeed was spoken by a U.S. colonel trying to rally his troops under withering fire: "Two kinds of people are staying on this beach -- the dead and those who are going to die. Now let's get the hell out of here."
The Allies turned their attention to an invasion of Europe even as British and American forces landed in North Africa in late 1942 to start the long road to Berlin. By the time D-Day began, they had already made their way through Italy and captured Rome.
But the Soviet leader, Josef V. Stalin, wanted the British and the Americans to pick up a greater burden of the war his people had been fighting for the last two years at a cost of millions of lives. He pressed President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill for the commitment that led to the Allied invasion -- code-named Overlord, planned and commanded by General Eisenhower.
The final Overlord plan called for one British and two U.S. airborne divisions to land behind the Normandy beaches to capture key causeways and bridges and repel any German counterattack.
U.S. troops would land on beaches code-named Utah and Omaha and British and Canadian troops on beaches Gold, Juno and Sword.
Chosen to command the Allied ground forces was British Gen. Bernard L. Montgomery, the hero of El Alamein, where "Monty's" British 8th Army finally turned the tide against Rommel's Afrika Korps in October 1942. Thus Rommel's nemesis was after him again.
On the German side, preparations for an invasion began in earnest after Rommel took command in France in November 1943. The famed Desert Fox placed underwater obstacles near the shoreline, planted millions of mines along possible beachheads and dug stakes into likely airborne landing sites. Fields were flooded into what became deadly bogs for landing Allied paratroopers already burdened with 150 pounds of equipment.
On the Allied side, secrecy and deceptions played a vital part in D-Day. So concerned were Allied commanders that the slightest hint of where the invasion might take place might leak out, that U.S. troops were not allowed to practice hedgerow fighting for fear that might pinpoint Normandy as the invasion area.
The Allies set up a phony army in England called the 1st United States Army Group, under the command of Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, to deceive the Germans into thinking the landings would take place in the Pas-de-Calais area. Thousands of plywood tanks, fields of empty tents and hundreds of fake radio reports to the bogus army group helped to confuse German intelligence.
But ultimately, Overlord depended on one thing over which neither side had any control: the weather. The invasion would have to come in early June or in July when the combination of tides, moonlight and wind would make for a successful assault. These factors limited an early June invasion to June 5, 6 or 7.
By June 4, as Allied troops crowded nervously together in transport ships and paratroopers waited anxiously on airfield tarmacs, weather conditions were foreboding -- rain, wind and clouds.
When Eisenhower received word later that day of a possible 48-hour break in the weather around June 6, he polled his commanders and decided the fateful moment had arrived.
The invasion officially began at 12:15 a.m. June 6, when Capt. Frank L. Lillyman, leader of the 101st Airborne pathfinders, parachuted onto French soil.
Scattered by bad drops and moderate winds, the paratroopers nevertheless managed to reach most of their objectives during June 6. Casualties were high, approaching 40 percent in some cases.
As the giant armada of Allied vessels began disgorging its troops, the assault went comparatively smoothly on Utah Beach. Troops of the 4th Division quickly moved inland, took the causeways and linked up with the airborne troops. D-Day losses on Utah amounted to 197 casualties, in part because troops actually landed on the wrong landing sites and away from the strongest concentration of German guns.
DEATH TRAP AT OMAHA
At the British and Canadian beaches, troops moved inland with only slight resistance.
But Omaha was a death trap.
There, troops of the veteran 1st Infantry Division and the green 29th Infantry Division -- a Maryland/Virginia National Guard unit -- landed in the teeth of defenses manned by combat-seasoned German troops.
Companies were almost wiped out between the landing craft and the sea wall. As succeeding waves of troops landed at Omaha, the buildup of soldiers along the sea wall grew like pieces of sea shells washed ashore with the tide.
But hundreds died there; some without ever firing a shot; some at their own hands.
Hideous as the experience was, it might have been far worse if the Germans had been a little better prepared or had reacted better.
Most important, Hitler was ambivalent. He did not give his approval to release the elite panzer reserves and order a counterattack until 3:30 p.m. The delay was fatal. A drive by a panzer division into the British beachhead in the early evening failed. Rommel had been right -- the fate of Germany had been decided.
Rushing back to the front that day, Rommel considered the state of things and told an aide: "If I were the Allied commander right now, I could finish off the war in 14 days."
Ironically, the commander of U.S. ground troops, observing the scene from the bridge of the USS Augusta a mile off Omaha Beach, was contemplating defeat and retreat.
The reports from landing craft coxswains were that the landings on Omaha were a disaster. Years later, General Bradley wrote in his memoirs: "I agonized over the decision to withdraw, praying that our men could hang on."
In wasn't until around 2 p.m. that Bradley received the following message from his commander of the Omaha beach forces, "Troops formerly pinned down on Easy Red, Easy Green, Fox Red are advancing up the heights behind the beach."
Finally, General Bradley saw victory. At a cost of 2,500 casualties, bloody Omaha became part of history
Almost three months to the day -- Sept. 1 -- the first Allied soldier set foot on German soil. The rest took longer than the fortnight Rommel had predicted. Eleven months later, May 8, 1945, the war in Europe ended.
D-DAY
Only eight days in June provided the right combination on tide and dawn light for the Normandy invasion. At 9 a.m. Sunday, June 4, the British Admiralty issued gale warnings for the English Channel in 20 years. D-Day Monday, June 5, was posponed. The delay left the ships, some coming from Scotland, with enough fuel for only one more attempt or refueling would put D-day off for two weeks. When the invasion leaders met Sunday night, the forcaster announced a brief break in the storms starting on Monday night, June 5. The timetable forces the decision to be made in the next 30 minutes. The military men were pessimistic. The decision to go marked a turning point in World War II and for U.S. influence in Europe. It was the beginning of a dramatic increase in America's burden in war and later in peace. From then on until the end of the Cold War that followed between the Soviet Union and the West, the United States would be dominant in Europe. It took 11 months more to conquer Germany after D-Day. Afterward, Americans who had paid with lives to liberate Europe, would pay with their dollars to help rebuild the continent. Fittingly, the turning point in the war and the relationship began with acts of extraordinary sacrifice and heroism which have made the day one of the most memorable events in the history of modern warfare.
SOURCES: "D-day," by Warren Tute, John Costello and Terry Hughes, Collier Books; "Normandy 1944," by Stephen Badsey, Osprey Publishing Ltd.; "The second Front," by Douglas Botting, Time-Life Books; "D-Day and the Invasion of Normandy," by Anthony Kemp, Discoveries series, Harry N Abrams, Publishers;; Normandy Bridgehead," by Maj Gen H. Essame, Ballantine Books Inc.; "Report by the Supreme Commander to the Combined Chiefs of Staff on the Operations in Europe of the Allied Expeditionary Force," By Gen Dwight D Eisenhower, U.S. Government Printing Office; "D-Day Normandy, The Story and Photographs," by Donald M. Goldstein, Katherine V. Dillon and J. Michael Wenger, Brassey's (US); Fortress Europe, The Atlantic wall Guns," by Karl-Heinz Schmeelke and Michael Schmeelke, Schiffer Publishing Ltd.