On June 6, 1944, Allied forces landed on the northern French coast.
This is D-Day, as it is called in the West. The landing command replaces the difficult-to-pronounce local names of the settlements with the short and clear Omaha, Utah, Sword, Juno and Gold.
These are the code names of the “military” beaches of Normandy.
The Normandy landings were a turning point in World War II. They opened a second front in Europe and thus tore apart the forces of the German Wehrmacht, which was fighting in the east against the Soviet army. Preparations for the landings began in 1943 after the Tehran Conference of the Big Three - Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt.
Due to a sharp deterioration in the weather, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, General Eisenhower, changed the date of the Normandy landings from June 5 to June 6, 1944 - tha.
Thus began Operation “Overlord” - the largest amphibious operation in history. At its very beginning, over 6 thousand ships, 160,000 people, 10 tank divisions and 11 thousand aircraft participated.
Hitler considered the area impregnable and left it weakly fortified.
Under Anglo-American command were soldiers from the USA, Great Britain, Canada, Belgium, Norway, Poland, Luxembourg, Greece, Czechoslovakia, New Zealand and Australia, as well as 177 Frenchmen. They must seize bridgeheads on the continent and open a path to Berlin while the Russians advance from the east.
By midnight on June 6, the Allies had suffered 10,500 casualties - killed, wounded, missing or captured. The Americans suffered the most - 6,000, with only 2,500 of them on Omaha Beach.
The Battle of Normandy lasted for over two months.