Operation Overlord
Operation Overlord was the codename assigned to the Allied liberation of German-occupied Western Europe, beginning on the 6th of June 1944. Nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel on that single day. A 1,200-plane airborne assault departed England just before midnight, preceding the seaborne landings by several hours. More than 5,000 vessels carried the assault troops toward five beaches along the Normandy coast of France.
American general Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded as head of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. British general Bernard Montgomery led all the land forces as commander of the 21st Army Group. The decision to attempt the crossing had been debated at conferences in Washington and Quebec before a plan was finalised. Eventually 39 divisions would be committed to the campaign, drawn from American, British, Canadian, Polish, and French forces.
On the 4th of June 1944, storms were battering the Channel and the entire invasion force was on standby. The question of whether Operation Overlord would proceed at all had not yet been answered.
Allied planners initially weighed four possible landing sites: Brittany, the Cotentin Peninsula, Normandy, and the Pas-de-Calais. Brittany and the Cotentin were peninsulas; the Germans could have severed any Allied advance at a narrow isthmus. The Pas-de-Calais was the closest point in continental Europe to Britain. It was also the most heavily fortified stretch of French coastline, and rivers and canals behind it offered little room for expansion inland. Normandy, by contrast, permitted simultaneous pressure on Cherbourg, on the Brittany ports further west, and on an overland route toward Paris.
The COSSAC staff planned for the invasion to begin on the 1st of May 1944. Eisenhower and Montgomery first reviewed the plan on the 31st of December 1943; it proposed amphibious landings by three divisions, with two more in support. Both generals immediately pushed to expand the operation. They wanted five divisions in the initial wave, with airborne descents by three additional divisions, to allow operations across a wider front. Acquiring the extra landing craft pushed the invasion date back a month, to June 1944.
Eisenhower had tentatively chosen the 5th of June as the assault date. On the 4th of June, high winds and heavy seas made launching landing craft impossible, and low cloud would have prevented aircraft from finding their targets. By the evening of that day, Group Captain James Stagg of the Royal Air Force predicted better conditions ahead. Stagg led the Allied meteorological team and believed the 6th of June would be workable. He presented the forecast at the Allied headquarters at Southwick House in Hampshire. General Montgomery and Major-General Walter Bedell Smith were ready to proceed. Air Chief Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory expressed concern about air conditions. After discussion, Eisenhower decided the invasion should go ahead.
Had he postponed again, the next window with suitable tides fell between the 18th and the 20th of June. A major storm lasting four days struck between the 19th and the 22nd of June; landings during that period would have been impossible.
Juan Pujol Garcia, a Spanish opponent of the Nazis, spent two years building a fictional network of informants. German intelligence believed these fabricated sources were gathering real intelligence across Britain. Garcia operated under the British code name Garbo and sent hundreds of messages to his handlers in Madrid in the months before D-Day. The British intelligence service had crafted the content of those messages to point toward Calais as the invasion target, and July as the date.
Garcia's work was part of a broader Allied deception strategy called Operation Bodyguard. Fortitude North used fake radio traffic to suggest an attack on Norway was imminent. Fortitude South constructed the illusion of a large force assembling in Kent and Sussex. A fictitious First U.S. Army Group was invented, supposedly under the command of Lieutenant General George S. Patton. Dummy tanks, trucks, and landing craft were positioned near the coast. Genuine traffic from the 21st Army Group was first routed through Kent via landline before broadcast, so that German listeners would place the main Allied force there. Patton remained in England until the 6th of July, sustaining the Germans' belief that a second major landing at Calais was still coming.
Not a single German agent operating in Britain had escaped capture before D-Day. Several had been turned into double agents working for the Allies through the Double-Cross System. On the night of the 5th of June, 617 Squadron, the Dambusters, flew Operation Taxable, dropping strips of metal foil. German radar operators read these as a naval convoy approaching Cap d'Antifer, roughly 80 km from the actual landing sites. No. 218 Squadron RAF ran a similar operation, called Operation Glimmer, near Boulogne-sur-Mer the same night. A small SAS team then dropped dummy paratroopers over Le Havre and Isigny to simulate a further airborne assault.
Men were sealed into their marshalling areas at the end of May and cut off from all outside contact. Troops were briefed on maps that were accurate in every detail except for the place names. Most did not learn their actual destination until they were already at sea. American general Henry J. F. Miller was sent home in disgrace for revealing the invasion date at a party.
The Dieppe Raid of the 19th of August 1942 showed the Allies what they could not do: assault a heavily defended French seaport head-on. That lesson drove two immediate decisions. The Allies would bring their own port, rather than try to capture one. And they needed armoured vehicles capable of surviving conditions no tank had been designed for.
COSSAC planners developed two artificial ports, called Mulberry harbours, to handle unloading on the open Normandy coast. Each consisted of a floating outer breakwater, concrete inner caissons called Phoenix breakwaters, and several floating piers. Blockship shelters, codenamed Gooseberries, supplemented the structure.
Major-General Percy Hobart supervised the development of specialised armoured vehicles, collectively nicknamed Hobart's Funnies. These were built on modified M4 Sherman and Churchill tank chassis. The Sherman Crab carried a rotating mine flail to clear paths through minefields. The Churchill Crocodile was a flame-throwing tank. The Armoured Ramp Carrier could be driven against a sea-wall so other tanks could use it as a ramp. On beaches where soft clay could not bear the weight of armour, the Bobbin tank unrolled matting as it moved, laying a surface ordinary vehicles could cross. The Assault Vehicle Royal Engineers, or AVRE, was a Churchill tank adapted for combat engineering; it carried a demolition gun for firing large charges into pillboxes. The Duplex-Drive tank used a waterproof canvas screen inflated with compressed air to stay afloat in open water.
Pipes just 3 inches in diameter were to be laid under the English Channel from the Isle of Wight to Cherbourg. The Allies called this system PLUTO, for Pipe-Line Under The Ocean. The aim was to have fuel flowing by D-Day plus 18. Technical problems and the delay in capturing Cherbourg pushed the operational date back to the 22nd of September. A second line was laid from Dungeness to Boulogne in late October.
The Allied Expeditionary Air Force flew over 3,200 photo-reconnaissance sorties between April 1944 and the 6th of June. The flights covered coastlines, beaches, inland terrain, bridges, and defensive structures. A BBC appeal for holiday pictures and postcards of Europe produced over ten million items, some of which proved useful to planners. At Bletchley Park, code-breakers cracked the Enigma cipher used by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Supreme Commander West, by the end of March. German intelligence changed the codes after the Allied landings, but by the 17th of June the Allies were again reading them consistently.
Raids on St Nazaire and Dieppe in 1942 alarmed Hitler into ordering fortifications built along the entire Atlantic coast from Spain to Norway. He envisioned 15,000 emplacements manned by 300,000 troops. Shortages of concrete and manpower meant most of those strongpoints were never built. Shortly before D-Day, Rommel reported that construction was only 18 per cent complete in some areas.
The best fortifications in Normandy were concentrated at the port facilities at Cherbourg and Saint-Malo, not on the landing beaches. Rommel was given command of Army Group B with responsibility for strengthening the defences along the expected invasion front. He ordered wooden stakes, metal tripods, mines, and anti-tank obstacles placed on the beaches to impede landing craft and delay tanks. He expected the Allies to land at high tide and placed many of these obstacles at the high-tide mark. On his order, the number of mines along the coast was tripled. In fields and meadows, booby-trapped stakes known as Rommelspargel, or Rommel's asparagus, were erected to deter airborne landings.
Rommel believed the invasion had to be stopped on the beaches before Allied air power made large-scale movement impossible. General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, commanding Panzer Group West, held the opposite view. Geyr argued for holding the Panzer formations in a central reserve near Paris and Rouen, to be committed once the main Allied beachhead was identified. Hitler resolved the dispute by giving Rommel operational control of three tank divisions. Four further divisions became Hitler's personal strategic reserve, not to be moved without his direct orders.
German soldiers stationed in France were on average six years older than their Allied counterparts. Many along the Normandy coast belonged to the Ostlegionen, eastern legions made up of conscripts and volunteers from Turkestan, Russia, and Mongolia, equipped mainly with captured and unreliable weapons. The western forces had also been stripped by transfers to the east. During the Soviet Dnieper-Carpathian Offensive, the German high command pulled the entire II SS Panzer Corps out of France. In total, 45,827 troops and 363 tanks, assault guns, and self-propelled anti-tank guns were transferred. Of the eleven panzer or panzergrenadier divisions stationed in France, seven were not fully operational or were only partially mobile in early June 1944.
On the evening before D-Day, the Luftwaffe meteorological centre in Paris was predicting two more weeks of storms. Many Wehrmacht commanders had left their posts to attend war games in Rennes. Rommel had returned to Germany for his wife's birthday, planning to meet Hitler to request more tanks.
Preliminary naval bombardment commenced at 05:45 on the 6th of June. It came from five battleships, twenty cruisers, sixty-five destroyers, and two monitors. Infantry began arriving on the beaches at around 06:30. The five sectors each produced a different story that morning.
At Utah, the U.S. 4th Infantry Division landed roughly 1,800 metres south of its intended position after currents pushed the craft off course. The troops met light resistance and suffered fewer than 200 casualties. They advanced about 4 miles inland and made contact with the 101st Airborne Division. The airborne drops supporting Utah were largely unsuccessful; only ten per cent of the paratroopers landed in their assigned zones. The 82nd Airborne Division captured Sainte-Mere-Eglise, its primary objective, but failed to secure the River Merderet crossings, delaying the sealing-off of the Cotentin Peninsula.
At Pointe du Hoc, two hundred men of the 2nd Ranger Battalion scaled 30-metre cliffs under fire from above. The battalion was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel James Rudder. The mission was to destroy a gun battery at the top of the cliff. The guns had already been withdrawn; the Rangers located them in an orchard about 550 metres south of the point and disabled them. By dawn on D+1, Rudder had only 90 men capable of fighting. Relief did not arrive until D+2, when the 743rd Tank Battalion reached the position.
Omaha was the costliest sector. The U.S. 1st Infantry Division, supplemented by troops from the 29th, encountered an unexpected opponent: the 352nd German Infantry Division, rather than the lighter garrison Allied planners had anticipated. Strong currents pushed many landing craft east of their intended positions. Duplex-Drive amphibious tanks sank in large numbers before reaching shore. Casualties at Omaha exceeded those at all the other beaches combined, as the men came under fire from the cliffs above. By late morning, barely six hundred men had reached the high ground beyond the beach. By noon, as German ammunition began to run short, Americans cleared lanes on the sand. The D-Day objectives at Omaha were finally accomplished by D+3.
At Gold, high winds made conditions difficult, and aerial attacks had missed the Le Hamel strongpoint, whose 75 mm gun kept firing until 16:00. The 1st Battalion, Hampshire Regiment captured Arromanches, the future site of Mulberry harbour B. At Juno, Canadian forces arrived ahead of their armoured support because of rough seas, suffering heavy casualties while disembarking. Casualties at Juno were 961 men. Despite those losses, the Canadians cleared the beach quickly. By nightfall, the combined Juno and Gold beachheads covered an area 12 miles wide and 7 miles deep. At Sword, 21 of 25 Duplex-Drive tanks reached shore safely and covered the infantry. At 16:00, the German 21st Panzer Division launched a counterattack between Sword and Juno that nearly reached the coast before being turned back.
Allied casualties on D-Day totalled at least 10,000, with 4,414 confirmed dead. German losses amounted to 1,000 men. Not one of the objectives set for the first day had been fully achieved: Carentan, St. Lo, Caen, and Bayeux all remained in German hands. The five bridgeheads were not linked into a continuous front until the 12th of June. By then, the Allies held a line around 97 km long and 24 km deep.
The first Mulberry harbour components arrived on D+1 and the structures were operational for unloading by mid-June. One went up at Arromanches, built by the British; the other at Omaha, built by the Americans. Storms on the 19th of June destroyed the Omaha harbour. The repaired Arromanches harbour received around 6,000 tons of materiel daily and remained in continuous use for the next ten months.
The terrain behind Utah and Omaha was bocage country. Thorny hedgerows grew on earthen embankments 3 to 4 feet high, with ditches on both sides and roads too narrow for tanks. The Germans had also flooded the fields behind Utah with sea water for up to 2 miles from the coast.
Cherbourg held the deep-water harbour the Allies needed. By D+3, Allied commanders had concluded it would not fall quickly and moved to cut the Cotentin Peninsula off from reinforcement. The inexperienced 90th Infantry Division failed in early attempts to cross the peninsula. Major General J. Lawton Collins, commanding VII Corps, reassigned the task to the veteran 9th Infantry Division. The 9th reached the west coast of the Cotentin on the 17th of June, cutting off Cherbourg. Joined by the 4th and 79th Infantry Divisions, the Allies took control of the peninsula in fierce fighting from the 19th of June. Cherbourg fell on the 26th of June. The Germans had already destroyed the port facilities; the harbour was not back in full operation until September.
Caen had been a planned first-day objective. The 21st Panzer Division and the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend fought the British and Canadians to a stalemate in the city's outskirts. During Operation Perch, XXX Corps attempted to advance on Mont Pincon, then shifted to a flanking attack from Tilly-sur-Seulles toward Villers-Bocage. Advanced elements of the British force were ambushed there, triggering the Battle of Villers-Bocage and then the Battle of the Box. The British withdrew to Tilly-sur-Seulles. After storms halted operations from the 17th to the 23rd of June, VIII Corps launched Operation Epsom on the 26th of June. Epsom failed its objectives but drew in every available German Panzer unit, causing heavy tank losses. Rundstedt was dismissed on the 1st of July and replaced as OB West by Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge. The change came after Rundstedt remarked that the war was now lost. The northern suburbs of Caen were bombed on the evening of the 7th of July and occupied in Operation Charnwood on the 8th and the 9th of July. Operations Atlantic and Goodwood completed the capture of the city and the high ground to the south between the 18th and the 21st of July. On the 20th of July, Hitler survived an assassination attempt even as the battle for Caen concluded.
The U.S. First Army launched Operation Cobra on the 25th of July, breaking south to reach Avranches by the 1st of August. Lieutenant General Patton's Third Army, activated on the 1st of August, swept through most of Brittany and drove as far south as the Loire. While II Canadian Corps pushed toward Falaise in Operation Totalise on the 8th of August, Bradley and Montgomery saw an opportunity. The bulk of the German forces could be encircled at Falaise. The Third Army reached Alencon on the 11th of August. Hitler insisted until the 14th of August that his forces should counter-attack rather than retreat. The resulting delays left German commanders without orders for periods as long as 24 hours. Messages had to travel to Hitler's residence at Obersalzberg in Bavaria before decisions could be made. The Canadians captured Falaise on the 16th of August. The gap closed on the 21st of August, trapping 50,000 German troops. More than a third of the German 7th Army and the remnants of nine of the eleven Panzer divisions had escaped east before the pocket was sealed. Kluge committed suicide on the 19th of August after Hitler discovered his role in the assassination plot of the 20th of July. On the 15th of August, a separate Allied invasion of southern France was launched, codenamed Operation Dragoon.
The French Resistance in Paris rose against the occupiers on the 19th of August. Eisenhower initially wanted to bypass the city to pursue other targets. De Gaulle insisted Paris must be taken immediately, citing reports that citizens were going hungry and Hitler's stated intention to destroy it. French forces of the 2nd Armoured Division under General Philippe Leclerc arrived from the west on the 24th of August. The U.S. 4th Infantry Division pressed up from the south. By the morning of the 25th of August, Paris was liberated. German forces retreated east across the Seine on the 30th of August 1944, marking the end of Operation Overlord.
From D-Day to the 21st of August 1944, the Allies landed 2,052,299 men in northern France. American armies suffered 124,394 casualties by the end of August: 20,668 killed and 10,128 missing. The First Canadian Army and the Second British Army together lost 83,045 men; 15,995 were killed, 57,996 wounded, and 9,054 missing. Of those, Canadian losses totalled 18,444, with 5,021 killed in action. One in seven Canadian soldiers killed between the 6th and the 11th of June died after surrendering, in a series of executions that became known as the Normandy Massacres. Allied air forces flew 480,317 sorties and lost 4,101 aircraft, along with 16,714 airmen. Allied tank losses reached an estimated 4,000, split roughly evenly between American and British or Canadian forces.
Allied forces captured 47,000 Germans in June, 36,000 in July, and 150,000 in August. German forces in France reported 158,930 killed, wounded, or missing between D-Day and the 14th of August. Of approximately 2,300 German tanks and assault guns committed to the battle, only 100 to 120 crossed the Seine when the campaign ended. The Luftwaffe lost 2,127 aircraft. By September, OB West had only 13 infantry divisions, 3 panzer divisions, and 2 panzer brigades still rated as combat effective.
Between 13,632 and 19,890 French civilians died during the liberation of Normandy. A further 11,000 to 19,000 Normans are estimated to have died in the pre-invasion bombing. In the city of Caen alone, the battle left only 8,000 liveable quarters for a population of over 60,000. Of the 18 listed churches in Caen, four were seriously damaged and five were destroyed, along with 66 other listed monuments. In the Calvados department, 76,000 citizens were made homeless. Of Caen's 210 pre-war Jewish population, only one survived the war. The Bayeux Tapestry had been stored at the Chateau de Sourches near Le Mans from the start of the war and survived intact.
The Normandy American Cemetery, on a bluff above Omaha Beach, covers 172.5 acres and holds the remains of 9,388 American military dead. The Normandy landings were the largest seaborne invasion in history. German commanders had long feared a repetition of the two-front war of World War I. The opening of a western front in 1944 confirmed that fear. Some historians see the subsequent race between Soviet and Western Allied forces for control of Europe as the start of the Cold War. At Pointe du Hoc, where Rangers scaled the cliffs on the 6th of June, the craters and bunkers are little changed from 1944.
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What was Operation Overlord in World War II?
Operation Overlord was the Allied military campaign to liberate German-occupied Western Europe, launched on the 6th of June 1944 with the Normandy landings. It ran until the 30th of August 1944, when German forces retreated east across the Seine. The operation committed 39 divisions drawn from American, British, Canadian, Polish, and French forces.
How many troops crossed the English Channel on D-Day during Operation Overlord?
Nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel on the 6th of June 1944, with about 132,000 arriving by sea and 24,000 by air. From D-Day to the 21st of August 1944, a total of 2,052,299 Allied troops landed in northern France.
Who commanded Operation Overlord?
American general Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force and held overall command of Operation Overlord. British general Bernard Montgomery commanded the 21st Army Group, which comprised all the land forces involved in the invasion. Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay led the Allied invasion fleet.
What was Operation Bodyguard and how did it support the D-Day landings?
Operation Bodyguard was the Allied deception strategy designed to mislead the Germans about the date and location of the Normandy landings. It included Fortitude South, which used a fictitious First U.S. Army Group under Lieutenant General George S. Patton to convince the Germans the main landing would come at Pas-de-Calais in July. Double agent Juan Pujol Garcia, code name Garbo, sent hundreds of carefully crafted messages to German intelligence in Madrid to reinforce this deception.
What were Allied casualties during the Battle of Normandy?
American armies suffered 124,394 casualties between D-Day and the end of August 1944, with 20,668 killed and 10,128 missing. The First Canadian Army and Second British Army together lost 83,045 men, including 15,995 killed. Allied air forces lost 4,101 aircraft and 16,714 airmen during the campaign.
What happened at the Falaise Pocket during Operation Overlord?
The Falaise Pocket was an encirclement of German forces in Normandy, closed on the 21st of August 1944. It trapped 50,000 German troops, of whom 10,000 were killed and 40,000 captured. More than a third of the German 7th Army and the remnants of nine of the eleven Panzer divisions escaped east before the pocket was sealed.
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