Normandy, Liberated France • June 6, 1944 It was a cloudy and chilly late spring day, D-Day, arguably the least ordinary day of the 20th century. Already Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe, stalked relentlessly by Anglo-American air forces, had surrendered air supremacy over the English Channel. Sadly for him, the Luftwaffe chief had just 327 aircraft to oppose the Allied…
Southwick House near Portsmouth, England • June 5, 1944 Weather conditions over France’s Normandy beaches on invasion day, D-Day, tentatively set for this date, June 5, 1944, had to be as ideal as possible before Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower would issue the “go” signal for the largest sea, air, and land invasion ever executed….
Southwick House, Southeast England • June 4, 1944 Tomorrow, June 5, 1944, a Monday, was to have been an epic day—the day Allied forces invaded a 50‑mile/80‑km stretch of German-occupied beach on the French Normandy coast. The cross-Channel invasion of Northwestern France, codenamed Operation Overlord, had been pushed from May, when there had been roughly…
RAF Aldermaston and Ramsbury Airfields, England • June 3, 1944 On this date in 1944 in Aldermaston, England, men of the 434th Troop Carrier Group and the 101st Airborne Division (“Screaming Eagles”) began moving 52 CG‑4A engineless combat gliders and C‑47 Skytrain tug planes onto the airfield to lead the glider phase of Operation Overlord, the invasion…
London, England • June 2, 1944 In June 1943 in Algeria, North Africa, the Free French founded the Comité Français de Libération Nationale (CFNL). Much political maneuvering was needed to merge the Free French, whose nucleus consisted of Frenchmen who had escaped German capture at Dunkirk, the Channel port in Northwestern France (May 26 to June 4,…
London, England • May 30, 1944 In the run-up to the invasion of mainland Europe (Operation Overlord), the Western Allies concocted an ambitious strategic deception plan to mislead their adversaries as to where and when the actual invasion would take place. Called Operation Fortitude, the plan had 2 polar-opposite components. Fortitude North supposedly threatened German-occupied Norway…
Berlin, Germany • May 24, 1943 In June 1942 German submarines sank 637,000 tons of British shipping—a greater total than in any previous or subsequent month. So many prowling U‑boats made it hard for merchant convoys sailing in the major trans-Atlantic traffic lanes to evade detection. The next year, in March, Atlantic U‑boats sank 82 ships…
London, England • May 19, 1940 Following Britain and France’s declaration of war on Germany on September 3, 1939, neither of the Allies committed to launching a significant land offensive against Adolf Hitler’s Germany as punishment for the invasion of its eastern neighbor, Poland, which was in a treaty relationship with the two Western powers. The…
Slapton Sands, Devon Coast, Southwest England • April 28, 1944 Shortly after midnight on this date in 1944 German torpedo boats (S‑boats, short for Schnell [Fast] boats) on a routine patrol out of Cherbourg in occupied France suddenly found themselves in the middle of Operation (or Exercise) Tiger, codenamed T‑4. Operation Tiger consisted of a convoy…
Sainte-Mère-Église, Liberated France • June 5, 1944 On this date in 1944 the stolid citizens of Sainte-Mère-Église, located near the center of the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy, France, retired to their beds on the eve of the largest air- and seaborne invasion in history—Operation Overlord. As early as 1942, U.S. military planners had been eyeing…