It was June 6th: the Allied landings in Normandy

On June 6, 1944, at dawn, an armada unprecedented in military history approached the Normandy coast: 4,266 transport ships, 722 warships, more than 10,000 aircraft, and 130,000 British, American, and Canadian troops ready to land on French soil. Codenamed Operation Overlord, this massive amphibious and airborne offensive marked the long-awaited opening of a second front in the West, demanded since 1942 by Stalin from the Allies, who until then had lacked the resources to maintain it. After four years of Nazi occupation, continental Europe finally saw the wave of liberation wash over it. By the evening of D-Day, 135,000 men had set foot on Norman soil. The ensuing battle would last eleven months and end with the surrender of Nazi Germany.

A colossal plan, a masterful deception

The choice of Normandy as the landing site was the result of long strategic deliberation. The Allies had considered four possible areas: Brittany, the Cotentin Peninsula, Normandy, and the Pas-de-Calais. The Pas-de-Calais, the narrowest point of the English Channel and the closest to England, was precisely the one Hitler was waiting for: he had amassed his best divisions and most powerful fortifications there. The Allies therefore decided to strike in Normandy, whose sandy beaches between the Orne and Vire rivers were less heavily defended, and to deceive the Germans until the very end. Operation Fortitude, for this purpose, erected a fake military deployment in Kent—inflatable armored vehicles, plywood airplanes, and dummy radio transmissions—designed to convince the German command that a landing at the Pas-de-Calais was imminent. The deception worked so well that, on the morning of June 6, of the 50 German divisions present in the region, only 17 faced the Allies in Normandy. Field Marshal Rommel, in charge of coastal defense, was absent, having gone to Germany to celebrate his wife's birthday. And the storm that had been raging in the English Channel for several days had led the Germans to lower their guard: that evening, barely 50,000 soldiers were able to confront the armada. During the night of June 5-6, 23,500 paratroopers from three airborne divisions were dropped behind enemy lines to secure the flanks of the landings and cut off German reinforcement routes.

D-Day: five beaches, a beachhead, a turning point

At 5:30 a.m., Allied battleships and bombers pounded the coastal fortifications. An hour later, five divisions landed simultaneously on five beaches with now-historic code names: Utah and Omaha for the Americans, Gold for the British, Juno for the Canadians, and Sword for the British, joined by Kieffer's French commandos. The day's toll was heavy but far less catastrophic than feared: approximately 3,400 killed and wounded on the American side, 3,000 on the British side, and 335 on the Canadian side, with three-fifths of Allied losses concentrated on Omaha Beach alone, where German resistance was fiercest. German losses are estimated at between 4,000 and 9,000 men. The preparatory bombardments also claimed the lives of 2,500 Norman civilians. But the beachhead was established. In the following days, Mulberry artificial harbors and an underwater oil pipeline enabled the mass transport of men and equipment. The ensuing Battle of Normandy would be fierce and deadly, but its outcome was no longer in doubt: eleven months later, on May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally.