Hear
It was the beginning of the end. When the first Allied soldiers set foot on the coast of Normandy in northern France, in the early morning of June 6, 1944, The Third Reich, which according to its messianic creators should last a thousand years, collapsed like a domino to become just a dark page in modern history.
The thousands of soldiers, mostly Americans, British and Canadians, who disembarked at half past six at the sites designated in advance, They were stabbing a dagger into the heart of the German war structure. The advance inland was from then on inevitable, and after a year, with successive fighting in country after country, Germany gave way and Europe was free.
Nazi officers, desperate for a war they saw getting out of hand, knew that an Allied invasion was imminent. For them it was essential to avoid the landing and not have another open front on the continent. They had enough with the advance from the east of the Soviet troops, which came at full speed taking revenge for the treacherous German invasion of 1941.
But where exactly would the Allied attack be? When would they release it? And with how much force? They were the same questions that the allies asked themselves many months before, when they became let’s do it to launch the most massive air, sea and land operation of all time.
Nothing was rushed. No decision was simple or obvious. At the end of the day, the astronomical numbers of the operation, in troops, vehicles and equipment, were so important, like strategy, ingenuity and surprise, crucial factors that determined the success of the landing. What opened Britain’s waters to Normandy, like Moses the Red Sea, was not just the martial steamroller of the arms industry.
“The strongest part of the operation was the allied strategic planning. At the end of World War II, General George Marshall called the cooperation between the United States and Great Britain ‘the most complete unification of military effort ever achieved by two nations’”Military analyst Kelly Grieco, Defense and Security specialist at the Stimson Center, based in Washington, told LA NACION.
“The close cooperation of the allies improved the plan. The Americans wanted to launch the invasion of Western Europe much earlier, in 1943, but the British opposed it.. They had been fighting the Germans for years, trained during Dunkirk and the Battle of Dieppe, and knew that the Americans were too inexperienced to launch such a large and complex operation. The British convinced President Franklin Roosevelt that it was best to wait. Instead, the Allies invaded North Africa, where The Americans gained much-needed experience to make the D-Day invasion a success in 1944.″he added.
The Nazis would have the answers to their questions in the early hours of D-Day. Suddenly the allies, pure secrecy until then, after sowing confusion for months with false leads, and after amassing the most formidable landing force, they were an open book and gave the enemy Army the lesson of their lives.
The attack occurred on five beaches on the Normandy coast, designated by the code names Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword, a front 80 kilometers long. More than 23,000 paratroopers did preliminary work, dropping during the night behind enemy lines to neutralize fortifications, take strategic points and secure the rear. Thousands of warships and landing craft were waiting in an area of the English Channel called “Piccadilly Circus”. Throughout the war, the Germans had failed to reach London, and now London was coming for them.
At half past six in the morning, after dawn, the astonished soldiers guarding the coast saw the sea dotted with thousands and thousands of boats. For them, it is impossible to count them. There were about 7,000, with 156,000 men and 10,000 vehicles on board. The ships were also supported by enormous air and naval forces, with 11,000 aircraft, much stronger than the German ones. The bombings hammered enemy positions, including the so-called “Atlantic Wall,” a discontinued set of fortifications that ran along 4,400 kilometers of coastline.
The Allies’ initial plan was to launch the attack the day before, June 5, when calm seas, a full moon and low waters were expected at first light. But it didn’t happen. Instead, there was a storm and the calendar had to be readjusted for the next day. The operation was called Neptune, but that did not mean that the sea would deign to obey.
Once the landing was launched, the element of surprise helped the British troops gain a foothold on Gold Beach. Canadians, British and Americans also controlled Juno, Sword and Utah.
But at Omaha, navigational difficulties meant that most of the landing craft did not reach their targets, and the Americans encountered a division of front-line German troops. It was where the most lives were lost, and the hardest nut to crack.
Nearly 4,400 Allied soldiers died on D-Day, with another 5,000 wounded. More difficult to estimate, the Germans lost between 4,000 and 9,000 men. They sold the defeat dearly, but after hours they were decimated by the incredible gale of men, rifles and bombs that came upon them. There was no way out.
The responsibility lay more with the military authorities, with the strategists who doubted where the attack would come from, They chose wrong and unprotected the areawhich was left with a limited number of divisions.
“The German military did not respond well. The resistance they offered in Normandy was less than expected by the allies.. The Allies’ deception before the landing worked quite well. The Germans did not think they would land in Normandy, so they were not prepared. Even if they had known for certain that Normandy was the correct destination, the German forces were greatly depleted at the time. Both the Navy and the aviation could not do much to stop the assault, and the best remaining German forces were in the east,” Pamela Swett, an expert in modern German history and dean of the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University, told LA NACION. , from Canada.
What exactly did the Allies do to fool the Nazis, as war historians highlight? Prime Minister Winston Churchill already said it: “In times of war, the truth is so precious that it must be escorted by a guard of lies.” Well, more than a guard, the allies created an army of lies. They hinted that they had about 350,000 men, with a few thousand ships and planes, stationed at Dover off another point on the French coast, Pas-de-Calais.
To achieve the deception, they increased the traffic of radio messages from that areaso that the Nazi operators who captured the signals believed that there was a large movement of troops, while they built fake airplanes, ships and tanks, props, made of wood or inflatable rubber, a task that was carried out by the technicians of a British film studio.
The allies had to continue fighting hard during the days that followed to gain ground and not be pushed back to the coast. As Robert Gildea, professor of modern history at the University of Oxford, told LA NACION, once again Coordination between the British and Americans was essential. But also between them and the Soviets, who were launching their own conclusive adventure to sweep the Nazis out of Europe and from history.
“The main factor in success was probably the size and coordination of the Allied forcesremembering that Operation Bagration The Soviet Union was launched on June 22 and liberated Belarus, Lithuania, Poland and Romania at the end of August. And as important as D-Day was Operation Dragoon in Provence, on August 15, which led to the rapid defeat of German forces in the northeast and the liberation of Lyon, Paris and other cities in ten days,” said Gildea, author of several books on France.
The Germans digested the defeat badly. According to Swett, things had been bad before, and the Normandy landings somehow deepened the sense of failure both among the German Armed Forces and society. “Hitler blamed his generals. The Chief of the Army Staff [Kurt Zeitzler] He resigned on July 1. Field Marshal in the west Karl von Rundstedt was dismissed, as was air commander Hugo Sperrle. These men They already knew the limits of the German Armed Forcesbut Hitler refused to accept the situation.”
