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

The Great Crusade

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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.

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. 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. 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.

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."

In The Pacific: A Second D-Day

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."

June 14, 1944, just nine days after the D-Day invasion of Normandy, another mighty fleet steamed towards its own D-Day landing. A huge U.S. flotilla of 800 ships carrying 162,000 men was about to attempt to smash into the outer defenses of the Japanese Empire. Their target was the Marianas Island group, which included Saipan, home to an important Japanese base and a large population of Japanese civilians, and Guam, the first American territory captured in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor.

During the next eight weeks, tens of thousands of men, hundreds of airplanes, and dozens of major warships were locked in mortal combat. Offshore, on June 19, Navy pilots shot down 400 planes in one day. The Navy called it the Battle of the Phillipine Sea; the pilots dubbed it The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.

When it was over, 60,000 Japanese ground troops and most of the carrier air power of the Imperial Navy were annihilated; Japan's leader, Tojo, was thrown out of office in disgrace; and the newly captured enemy airfields were being transformed into launching bases for the B-29s that would carry the conventional and, later, atomic bombs to Japan, turning the land of the Rising Sun into a charred cinder.

The Army Air Forces quickly built runways on two of the chain's islands, Guam and Tinian. From those runways lifted the B-29s that carried the war to the Japanese homeland - and ultimately ended it with a pair of atomic bombs. After the U.S. victory in the Marianas campaign, the road to Tokyo was clearly in sight. When Saipan fell, so did Japan's government. The Japanese considered the Marianas chain part of the inner perimeter of the defense of Japan itself - and with good reason.

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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