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On D-Day, June 6, 1944,
American, British & Canadian Armies Landed On
The Coast Of Normandy, France, To Begin

The Great Crusade

click image to enlarge At times, 20th century warfare seems to be nothing but statistics. Here is a random sampling of numbers from the Allied buildup to D-Day. 1,087: Transportplanes to carry American and British paratroopers into Normandy on June 6. 5,333: Vessels in the Allied armada - 2,727 ships crossing the Channel on their own bottoms, and 2,606 landing craft aboard the ships. 10,521: Allied warplanes supporting the invasion. Of the total, 3,467 were heavy bombers, 1, 654 medium and light bombers and 5,409 fighters. 54,000: Men required just for housekeeping chores in the final staging camps in southern England. 124,000: Hospital beds stockpiled by the Americans in Britain before the invasion. 175,000: Assault troops landed on D-Day, June 6. 450,000: Tons of ammunition stockpiled in Britain before the invasion. 600,000: Doses of penicillin stockpiled by the Allies for the invasion. 1,000,000: Gallons of gasoline needed each day by the Allies in their sweep across France. 1,450,000: Allied soldiers landed in Normandy in the first seven weeks of the campaign; 812, 000 of them were Americans. 3,500,000: Allied servicemen gathered in Britain in 1944 to invade Europe or support the invasion. 60,000,000: Three-meal K-ration packages shipped to GIs in Normandy in the invasion's first three weeks. As redundant as it sounds, the D stands for Day, nothing more. June 6, 1944, will forevermore be known as D-Day. But in truth, the Normandy invasion was just one of many D-Days in World War II. The term let planners talk about specific days - for example, D plus 1, or the day after D-Day - long before they knew the actual calendar date. Writer Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post has traced the first usage of D-Day back to World War I. A field order dated Sept. 7, 1918, said, "The First Army will attack at H-hour on D-day."

On the eve of D-Day, the feeling of history hung in the June air like summer humidity. The course of World War II in the West hung in the balance, and just about everybody sensed it.

Each soldier carried in his pocket a copy of a letter from Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, reminding even the lowest-ranking private that he was embarking on a "great crusade" to reconquer Europe from the Germans.

That sense of grand history wrapped itself around a British major, C.K. King. As his landing barge lurched toward France's Normandy coast, King thought of an earlier battle in France, and of the words Shakespeare had given it:

He that outlives this day,

and comes safe home

Will stand a tip-toe

when this day is named.

Once ashore, of course, the grand sweep of history gave way in a hurry to here-and-now reality. Take the experience of Ralph R. Burnett of Granite City, who assaulted Omaha Beach with the 1st Infantry Division. As he tells it: We had been given lifebelts that you inflated. We were instructed not to put them on too tight, because we wouldn't be able to get them off when inflated. But I was 19 years old and scared to death of water, so I got mine too tight. When I got to the beach, I couldn't get it off. Every time we hit the dirt, the inflated belt made me feel as if I was 10 feet off the ground. I just knew my butt was going to get shot off. I made it across the beach and hit the ground up the hill a little way. Right next to me was a combat engineer with a knife in his boot. I asked him to puncture that damned belt, and he did. I was never so glad to get my face - and my butt - all the way down in God's good earth.

That's hardly standing a-tiptoe with pride. Yet, even butt down in the earth of Normandy, Burnett was a part of something big - so big that the war in the West hinged on it. Fifty years later, we know, of course, that, it worked. But on June 6, 1944, men waded ashore into history with no idea how things would turn out.

Most recall D-Day as a very narrow affair, reaching no farther than the eye could see through the sights of an M-1 rifle. Those who parachuted from airplanes or splashed ashore from landing craft thought about trying to stay alive, not about making history.

Still, even close up, the sheer scope of the thing made a lasting imprint. Few have expressed it with quite the simple eloquence of the late William O. Schock of St. Louis, a B-26 pilot who landed in Normandy with the Ninth Air Force staff. Shortly after D-Day, he wrote: "Such a sight! I'll never forget it. D-Day off the French coast was something I would not have missed for the world. … Everything was on such a colossal scale that nothing will ever seem large to me again, or important."

It is hard to conceive the epic scope of this decisive battle that foreshadowed the end of Hitler's dream of Nazi domination. Overlord was the largest air, land, and sea operation undertaken before or since June 6, 1944. The landing included over 5,000 ships, 11,000 airplanes, and over 150,000 service men.

On the four-meter swells of the English Channel, Allied troops transferred to landing craft, some twelve miles off the French coast. British troops headed left toward Caen, the Americans right toward Utah and Omaha beaches nearer Cherbourg, and the Canadians to Juno Beach.

After years of meticulous planning and seemingly endless training, for the Allied Forces, it all came down to this: The boat ramp goes down, then jump, swim, run, and crawl to the cliffs. Many of the first young men (most not yet 20 years old) entered the surf carrying eighty pounds of equipment. They faced over 200 yards of beach before reaching the first natural feature offering any protection. Blanketed by small-arms fire and bracketed by artillery, they found themselves in hell.

For the Americans, Omaha was a near-suicide mission. First, a powerful undertow swept away lives and weapons; ten landing craft with twenty-six artillery guns and twenty-two of twenty-nine tanks were swamped. Then, they faced a maelstrom of bullets. Within ten minutes of landing every officer and sergeant of the 116th Regiment was dead or wounded.

Shaef Patch Pronunced "Shafe". Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (abbreviated as SHAEF, pronounced "shaf"), was the headquarters of the Commander of Allied forces in north west Europe, from late 1943 until the end of World War II. General Dwight Eisenhower was in command of SHAEF throughout its existence. The rank itself shares a common lineage with Supreme Allied Commander Europe and Atlantic, but they are different titles.

Leaders of all ranks asserted themselves. "Two kinds of people are staying on this beach," the commander of the 1st Division's 16th Infantry Regiment, Col. George A. Taylor, exclaimed to his men, "the dead and those who are going to die. Now let's get the hell out of here." The sergeants were especially abrupt. Resorting to curses they had hoarded for years, they exhorted their men to get off the beach.

As the invaders reorganized, Allied destroyers moved close to shore. Risking grounding and almost point-blank fire from enemy batteries, they raked the cliffs with their guns. More and more landing craft also pushed their way to the beach, bringing new troops, heavy weapons, radios, and ammunition. Americans received the first news of D-Day, 300 men had struggled through mortar fire, across the body and equipment strewn beach, and up a bluff to attack the German defenses.

By nightfall, Allied power had prevailed all across the Normandy beachhead, the Allies had a toehold on the continent, yet, on "Bloody Omaha" alone, 3,000 Americans lay dead. When it was over, the Allied Forces had suffered nearly 10,000 casualties; more than 4,000 were dead. Yet somehow, due to planning and preparation, and due to the valor, fidelity, and sacrifice of the Allied Forces, Fortress Europe had been breached. More than 100,000 men had come ashore, the first of millions who would follow.

All the articles in this section were researched and written by Harry Levins (52) of the Post Dispatch staff who has wide experience reporting military affairs and history. He was one of the principal writers of the Post-Dispatch coverage of the Persian Gulf War and was among the reporters invited by the Pentagon in 1991 to sail on the Missouri, America's last battleship, as it journeyed to Pearl Harbor for the ceremony with President George Bush marking the anniversary of the Japanese attack. In 1964-65, He served as an infantry lieutenant with the 4th Armored Division in Germany. He was part of an American Army that is in Europe still today because of what began on the beaches of Normandy, France, June 6, 1944. St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Sunday, June 5, 1994.

D-Day Ships The Allied Invasion Fleet, June 1944. Buffetaut. This classic work offers a superb appraisal of the Allies' naval contribution to the largest amphibious operation in history. The author examines the ships, the planning, the channel voyage, the landings on American and British beaches, the Mulberry Harbors, and the great storm, with many craft detailed and accompanied by plans and action photographs.

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