REMEMBRANCE TOURISM GUIDE 2019 A BRIEF BACKGROUND AND OVERVIEW OF


Clockwise from this image: The D-Day Landings began at 6.30am on June 6, 1944; news report in the Los Angles Times; Allied invasion plans; US glider reinforcements arrive


D-DAY


D-Day is a military term describing the date on which a combat attack or operation commences, and is most commonly used to refer to the Normandy invasion by some 156,000 Western Allied troops (61,715 British, 73,000 American and 21,400 Canadian) in World War II. The seaborne invasion, known as le débarquement in French, marked the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler’s German occupation of France and within a year the war was over.


PLANNING


Plans for a cross-Channel invasion had begun in May 1943 (at the Trident Conference, held in Washington D.C.), with four potential landing sites earmarked: Brittany, the Cotentin Peninsula, Normandy’s beaches and Pas-de-Calais. The first two were ruled out as they were narrow isthmuses, deemed too easy to seal off by the Germans. Pas-de-Calais was the closest to the United Kingdom,


140 ❘ FRANCE TODAY Apr/May 2019


yet was heavily fortified and offered little scope for a post-invasion onward displacement of troops. Normandy, which offered access down to Paris and over to the port of Cherbourg, was thus selected as the best option.


OPERATION FORTITUDE


Prior to the invasion, Allied forces employed a series of deception techniques on England’s south coast and in Scotland in order to mislead the Germans. These included positioning dummy inflatable tanks (and ‘phantom’ field armies), fake landing craft at embarkation points and using double agents to pass on misleading intelligence, as well as leaked intel through diplomatic channels. Operation Fortitude, run under the Supreme Headquarters Allied


Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) commanded by General Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower, was part of


a broader plan, Operation Bodyguard, which was designed to deceive German high command into believing that the Allies were planning attacks on Pas-de-Calais, the Balkans, southern France and Norway. The deception worked: German command, particularly Rommel, took steps to heavily fortify Pas-de-Calais. But the Allied deception went one stage further: they wanted the Normandy landings to appear to be a diversionary tactic for a larger invasion of France via Pas-de-Calais, by what the Germans believed was a 1st US Army Group (FUSAG), a fictitious force under General George Patton that was positioned in Dover.


Hitler believed that the Allies would attack across the Straits of Dover and so Operation Overlord retained the element of surprise. Moreover, this force was retained up to four months after D-Day, to continue the conceit that an attack on Pas-de-Calais was still coming.


TARGETS


The massive assault was delayed by 24 hours due to bad weather and rough seas but the 50-mile stretch of coast remained the target; it was divided into five sectors, named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword.


OPERATION OVERLORD


Operation Overlord (codenamed Operation Neptune) began just after midnight on June 6, 1944, when more than 13,000 elite paratroopers of the American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, as well as several thousand from the British 6th Airborne Division, were parachuted over Normandy by more than 1,200 aircraft. For 40 minutes from 5.50am, US navy battleships USS Arkansas, USS Nevada and USS Texas, alongside British battleships, destroyers and cruisers, bombarded German gun emplacements on the targeted beaches. This was followed at 6.30am by


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