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 for the “military” beaches of Normandy.
The Normandy landings are a turning point in World War II. They open a second front in Europe and thus tear apart the forces of the German Wehrmacht, which was fighting in the east against the Soviet army. Preparations for the landings began as early as 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.
Thus began Operation Overlord, the largest amphibious operation in history. At its very beginning, over 6,000 ships, 160,000 men, 10 tank divisions and 11,000 aircraft participated.
Hitler considered the area impregnable and left it lightly 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 road 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.