EXACTLY 65 YEARS ago, on June 6th, 1944, the largest seaborne invasion force in history landed on the beaches of Normandy. From the shores of occupied France, previously bombarded by some 11,000 Allied aircraft, the German defenders watched the approaching fleet with a combination of awe and horror. To one of the Wehrmacht soldiers guarding the French coastline the approaching 7,000 vessels looked like “a gigantic town on the sea” unleashing a naval bombardment “like an earthquake”.
But victory was by no means certain. “It may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war,” feared Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke on the eve of the invasion. The supreme Allied commander, Gen Eisenhower, even prepared a provisional press release announcing that “the landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed”. In order to secure victory, Eisenhower was prepared to accept astonishingly high casualty rates. Military planners anticipated that 20,000 troops, more than a quarter of the invasion force, would be killed or wounded on the first day of the operation.