D-Day

By the spring of 1944, with Germany still reeling from great losses on the Eastern front following defeat at Stalingrad and Kursk, and with the Allies having obtained air supremacy over much occupied territory, the Allied commanders had come to the decision that the only way forward to the liberation of Western Europe, and thus the pushback of Axis forces back into Germany, was to invade occupied France via its northern beaches. Prior to the invasion being put into action the Allies had conducted a large-scale deception campaign, Operation Fortitude, to mislead the Germans about their intended target.

Hitler and his command staff knew from the immense build-up of Allied troops and equipment in southern England that invasion was imminent: what they didn’t know was where and when. As a defensive measure, Hitler put his trusted general Erwin Rommel (The Desert Fox) in charge of spearheading German defence operations in northern France in November 1943. He charged Rommel with the construction of the Atlantic Wall, a 2,400-mile-long concrete fortification of bunkers, landmines, and barbed wire that would stretch down the west coast of Europe from occupied Demark to Vichy France. However, by the spring of 1944 the wall was less than half-finished, so to make up for the shortfall the Germans planted thousands of jagged underwater obstructions designed to rip the hulls of invading boats to shreds along the coast. Rommel’s strategy was to use the German Infantry and several tank units to meet the Allies directly on the beaches and force them back into the Channel, preventing them from even gaining a bridgehead.

Rommel and members of the High Command, including his superior, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, reasoned that the Allies were most likely to land at Calais, as it was the narrowest point of the English Channel. They thought their assumption had been confirmed by reported heavy accumulation of Allied troops in seaports opposite the Calais region, they had fallen into the trap set for them during by Operation Fortitude, in a series of clever deceptive manoeuvres and the leaking of false intelligence to distract the Germans from the true intended landing target: Normandy. Rundstedt and Rommel therefore positioned fifteen infantry divisions around Calais, with a far smaller number guarding Normandy, around 200 miles southwest.

The Germans also predicted the Allies would strike during the favourable May tides and were placed on full alert for the whole month, yet as weeks of calm waters went by May was unnervingly quiet. June began with a violent storm, bringing high winds, rain and choppy water to the English Channel. Confident that the rough seas would stave off the threat of invasion for the time being, Rommel left France to visit his family in southern Germany. Most of Rommel’s command staff headed inland for a conference. At the same time, the stormy weather had brought all aerial reconnaissance around England to a temporary halt.

Meanwhile, across the Channel, Allied Supreme Commander General Eisenhower faced one of the most important decisions…