In 1943, the decision was made to attack the Germans in the spring of 1944. It was called Operation Overlord. On June 6, 1944, Allied troops invaded Normandy on the northern coast of France.
The invasion was originally planned for June the fifth, but due to bad weather it was postponed until June the sixth. The Allies consisted of the United States, Britain, France, and Canada. The night before the attack Eisenhower ordered that the thousands of war ships, military and civilian, depart from English ports. They carried the assault force of one hundred and fifty-six thousand Allied soldiers through the English channel. Thousands of war planes flew close to the attack site until the attack.
A fleet of warships bombarded German fortifications along the beaches. One hundred and thirty-five thousand men and twenty thousand vehicles invaded the beaches. In the next few days, the Allies secured the beaches. Some of the most important beaches in this battle are Omaha, Utah, and Juno beaches. The battle started when the British sixth air born division went in at ten minutes after midnight.
They were the first troops to go into action. The second attack was by the eighty second in the one hundred and first division of air born attacks. They were less successful than the first division. On Juno beach, the Canadian forces landed first. Their first wave suffered a loss of fifty percent of their casualties. It was the highest of any of the five Doom’s day battles excluding Omaha beach.
By the end of Doom’s day, fourteen thousand Canadians had been successfully landed. They penetrated further into France then any other allied force. Between Juno and Sword beaches the Canadians did most of their counter attacks on Germany. The fiftieth division took over Gold beach when they got there.
No division came closer to it’s objective than the Canadians at Juno. Omaha beach was invaded on June tenth. On Omaha beach, one of the most chaotic parts of the battle, the United States first infantry went through the worst part of the landings out of any of the beaches. Their Sherman tanks had been mostly lost before they reached the shore. The three hundred and fifty second division was some of the best trained on the beaches. Within ten minutes, every officer and Sargent had been wounded or killed.
The division had over four thousand casualties. The remaining survivors regrouped and headed inland. Allied invasion plans were not as bad as some seemed. Ten thousand out of the twenty thousand feared by Churchill. The United States made very slow progress and suffered a lot of casualties even though the successful Normandy invasion was costly in terms of materials and men.
During the next few months, several thousand troops and millions of equipment came pouring into France for the Allied troops. In July, the Allies broke through the German boundaries. General George Patton’s army started a lightening fast advance through France. The Allied troops freed Paris in August. By September, there were two million Allied troops in France.
By the end of July 1944, almost one million Allied troops, most of them American, British, and Canadian were entrenched in Normandy. On July twentieth, a few German officers fried to kill Hitler because they knew that the war was lost. Their attempt failed, and because of them hundreds of suspected conspirators were killed. In the end, the Allies won the war.
