On June 6, 1944, Allied forces land on the northern French coast. This is D-Day, as they call it in the West. Landing Command replaced the hard-to-pronounce local names of the settlements with the short and crisp Omaha, Utah, Sword, Juneau and Gold.
These are the code names of the “military” beaches of Normandy.
The Normandy landings were a turning point in World War II. He 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 landing 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 Force, General Eisenhower, changed the date of the Normandy landings from 5 – you on June 6, 1944 – so.
This is how operation “Overlord” – the largest amphibious operation in history. At its very beginning, over 6,000 ships, 160,000 people, 10 tank divisions and 11,000 aircraft participated.
Hitler considered the area impregnable and left it lightly fortified.
Under the Anglo-American command are soldiers from the USA, Great Britain, Canada, Belgium, Norway, Poland, Luxembourg, Greece, Czechoslovakia, New Zealand and Australia, as well as 177 Frenchmen. They must capture 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 are the most – 6,000, with only 2,500 of those in Omaha Beach.
The Battle of Normandy lasted over two months.