When was D-Day?
D-Day is the common name for the start of the Normandy landings by Allied forces, including British, American and Commonwealth soldiers, on 6 June 1944. The landings, which were part of Operation Overlord, marked the beginning of the liberation of France and Europe from Nazi Germany, ultimately leading to Allied victory in the Second World War. The world will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings on 6 June 2024.
What was D-Day?
The sky above Normandy in northern France was full of men floating to earth in the minutes after midnight on Tuesday 6 June 1944.
The first to jump were 120 US Pathfinders under the command of Captain Frank Lillyman. They had sung songs on the flight across the Channel from their base in England to keep up their spirits. They left the aircraft with “wonderful” morale, recalled Lillyman, parachuting to earth without incident. They then went about their business with swift and silent precision, marking a series of drop zones with fluorescent panels and radar beacons for the imminent arrival of a huge airborne landing over an area of the Cherbourg Peninsula measuring 50 square miles.
Fifty miles east of the US Pathfinders, 60 British Pathfinders from the 22nd Independent Parachute Company were undertaking a similar task on the eastern extremity of the invasion zone. They had half an hour to erect three drop zones using their lights and transponding ground radar before 4,255 soldiers from the British 6th Airborne Division started jumping over Merville, Ranville, Troarn and Trouville.
Back on the western sector of the invasion zone, six men from the British Special Air Service (SAS) parachuted into the black Normandy night along with 200 dummy parachutists nicknamed ‘Ruperts’. Constructed out of sandbags, the Ruperts were a third the size of an average man but in the dark, and from the ground, they resembled a soldier as they fell to earth, and were intended to distract the Germans from the main drop zones.
A larger contingent of British special forces came to earth in Normandy at 12.30am in six Horsa gliders. The objective of Major John Howard and 180 men of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry was to seize two small bridges over the River Orne (Ranville Bridge) and Caen Canal (Bénouville Bridge). These were to be held in order to prevent German tanks reaching the beaches as the seaborne invasion was in progress. One of the first men out of the gliders was Lieutenant Den Brotheridge, commander of 25 Platoon. He raced across the 100 feet of open ground to Bénouville Bridge with a yell of “Come on 25!” Moments later he was shot dead. Brotheridge was the first Allied fatality of D-Day but many more soldiers, sailors and airmen would be dead by the end of the day.
Lieutenant Den Brotheridge was the first Allied fatality of D-Day
At 1.15am the main US airborne assault began comprising 6,600 men of the 101st Division and 6,400 men of the 82nd Division. Aboard one of the 882 aircraft was Carl Beck, an 18-year-old from Missouri, a member of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Division. Their mission was to seize the strategically important village of Pouppeville, but as the aircraft approached the drop zone it was hit by 20 mm German anti-aircraft fire. “It was a bad scene,” Beck said in later life. “You could hear the 20 mm hitting the airplanes – it’s like your head is in a bucket and somebody is pounding on the bucket.”
They were told to jump before the aircraft exploded. Beck landed safely, amid “all kinds of shooting and activity”. He found one of his comrades, but they soon realised that they were miles from their target. There was nothing for the pair to do but lie low and try to avoid being captured.
Throughout the rest of the night, the British and US airborne troops fought fierce engagements with the Germans, slowly securing their objectives as dawn broke and the main invasion fleet approached the coast.
The first soldiers to come ashore were the Americans at 6.30am on the western beaches that had been given the codenames ‘Utah’ and ‘Omaha’. The weather was poor – strong winds made for a rough swell and troublesome waves that hindered the 23,000 men of the US 4th Infantry Division on Utah Beach. Nonetheless, the troops quickly managed to establish a beachhead.
But on Omaha, the 34,000 men of the 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions suffered terrible casualties from German machine-gunners concealed in concrete bunkers. One of the invaders was Charles Norman Shay, a Native American of the Penobscot Nation, a medic in the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division. “Of the men standing at the front of the landing craft when the ramp went down, many were hit immediately,” Shay recalled. “When I left the landing craft I landed in water about up to my chest. I made my way to the obstacles that the Germans had put up. I was using these for protection. Most of the men who had landed were doing the same thing. I was able to make a dash for the beach, got there, and started treating the wounded.”
The British and Canadians were tasked with securing beachheads at the other beaches codenamed ‘Gold’, ‘Juno’ and ‘Sword’, and they began coming ashore at 7.25am. Gold, the middle of the five, was the responsibility of 25,000 soldiers of the British 50th (Northumbrian) Infantry Division. One of them was Billy Moss of the 61st Regiment, Reconnaissance Corps, who shortly before the invasion had told his brother that he didn’t think he would survive. As the ramp of his landing craft went down, he jumped into the sea. However, the water was deeper than expected and Billy, weighed down by his equipment and his heavy radio set, drowned.
Fate was out of most men’s hands in those bloody few hours as thousands parachuted from the sky or waded through the surf. Bullets and shells hit some and missed others.
On Juno Canadian Lockie Fulton, commanding a company of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, recalled the turmoil: “We simply struggled through it. You’d see a guy fall next to you. You couldn’t help him, but you’d try to drag him along anyway. It was something to see those bullets skipping at you like
stones across the water.”
Throughout the morning, the Allies made slow but steady progress inland, even from the beach at Omaha, bloodied by the 2,000 casualties the Americans had suffered in establishing a beachhead with the help of the guns of US Navy destroyers.
At 12.15pm the prime minister Winston Churchill told Parliament that “the first of the series of landings in force upon the European Continent has taken place... So far the commanders who are engaged report that everything is proceeding according to plan.”
Part of that plan was the transportation across the Channel of two huge mobile harbours codenamed Mulberry, which would enable the Allies to swiftly resupply the invasion force. By mid-afternoon on 6 June the first components of the harbours were being towed into place.
In contrast to the invaders’ efficiency, the Germans’ response was confused. It was not until late afternoon that 124 tanks of the 21st Panzer Division were ordered to the beachhead. Corps commander General Erich Marcks told one of the division’s commanders, “If we don’t throw the British back into the sea, we shall have lost the war.” By now, however, the Allies had got tens of thousands of men and armour ashore, and the Panzers were attacked and forced to withdraw.
There would still be plenty of hard fighting in the months ahead, but the tide of war had turned the way of the Allies. At 9pm on 6 June, George VI addressed Britain, the Empire and North America on the BBC: “After nearly five years of toil and suffering, we must renew that crusading impulse on which we entered the war and met its darkest hour,” he declared. “We and our Allies are sure that our fight is against evil and for a world in which goodness and honour may be the foundation of the life of men in every land.”
