Operation Overlord

Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force established its forward command post at Southwick House, above Portsmouth, within sight of anchorages filling with the invasion fleet. Assault troops were sealed into marshalling areas along the south coast, briefed, issued with French currency and cut off from all outside contact.

Group Captain James Stagg told the commanders' conference that a depression was tracking towards the Channel and that 5 June would bring high winds, heavy cloud and a rough sea. His three forecasting teams, at Dunstable, at the Admiralty and at the American unit at Widewing, had reached sharply different conclusions, and his task was to give Eisenhower one answer rather than an argument.

At the pre-dawn conference Eisenhower accepted the forecast and ordered a 24-hour postponement. Ships already at sea were recalled. Some convoys were turned in the open Channel and brought back into port without breaking radio silence or being spotted from the French coast.

With rain driving against the library windows, Stagg told the conference that a ridge of high pressure would follow the depression across the Channel, giving improved conditions from late on 5 June through the 6th before the weather closed in again.

Stagg confirmed the break. After polling his commanders and sitting for a long moment in silence, Eisenhower gave the order for 6 June. It was his alone to make and could not be delegated.

Eisenhower drove to Greenham Common to see off Company E, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. Leigh-Mallory had predicted airborne casualties as high as seventy per cent and asked in writing that the drop be cancelled; Eisenhower overruled him and recorded his reasons.

Three Horsa gliders carrying D Company, 2nd Battalion Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, released at 5,000 feet and flown in silence, landed within yards of the Caen Canal bridge at Bénouville. Two more came down beside the Orne bridge 400 yards east.

The 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions began dropping across the base of the Cotentin to seize the causeways behind Utah Beach and the crossings of the Merderet and Douve. Cloud broke up the transport formations, flak scattered them further, and the great majority of sticks came down away from their drop zones, some by miles.

Aircraft of 617 and 218 Squadrons flew precise rectangular circuits towards Cap d'Antifer and Boulogne, dropping Window at calculated intervals to generate on German radar the echo of two large convoys advancing at seven knots. Small boats towing radar reflectors supported the illusion below.

Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway's 9th Parachute Battalion had planned the attack on the casemated battery above Sword Beach in meticulous detail. His battalion arrived so scattered that he attacked with roughly 150 of 600 men, without gliders, mortars, mine detectors or engineers.

The 3rd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment cleared Sainte-Mère-Église and cut the telephone cable running north to Cherbourg. It was the first French town freed in the invasion.

Battleships, monitors, cruisers and destroyers of the Eastern and Western Task Forces opened fire on coastal batteries and beach defences. Close to 7,000 vessels of all types were at sea, the largest amphibious armada ever assembled.

The 4th Infantry Division came ashore roughly 2,000 yards south of its intended sector, pushed by a strong current after two control craft were lost. The stretch it landed on was more lightly held than the one it had trained for.

Almost everything failed at once. Of 32 DD swimming tanks launched by the 741st Tank Battalion, 27 foundered in the swell far offshore. The aerial bombardment fell inland. Landing craft came in off-station, units landed intermixed, and the beach was overlooked along its length by bluffs held by the 352nd Infantry Division, a formation better and more forward-deployed than Allied intelligence had allowed for.

Three companies of the 2nd Ranger Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel James Rudder landed beneath a hundred-foot cliff between Utah and Omaha and climbed it under fire using rocket-fired grapnels and extension ladders borrowed from the London Fire Brigade.

The British 50th (Northumbrian) Division landed an hour after the American beaches, the tide running along the coast having pushed H-Hour eastwards. Hobart's specialised armour came ashore with the assault waves: flail tanks for mines, bridging and fascine vehicles, and the Churchill AVRE with its petard mortar for concrete.

The Canadian 3rd Infantry Division landed late, against an offshore reef and a rising tide that carried the leading craft into the beach obstacles rather than short of them. Nearly a third of the landing craft in the first wave were damaged or lost.

The British 3rd Infantry Division landed on the easternmost beach with orders to take Caen on the first day. No. 4 Commando, and 177 men of No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando under Commandant Philippe Kieffer, the only French troops in the assault, cleared Ouistreham.

With the assault stalled at the shingle and casualties mounting, US and British destroyers ran in until they were nearly scraping their keels, some to within 800 yards, and engaged bunkers and gun positions over open sights on the bluffs.

The armoured reserve in France was divided between Rommel's Army Group B, Rundstedt's OB West, and an OKW reserve that only Hitler could release. Hitler was asleep at the Berghof and his staff would not wake him.

The only substantial German armoured counterattack of the day drove north through the gap between Sword and Juno. A battlegroup of 21st Panzer Division reached the coast at Lion-sur-Mer in the late afternoon, the only German unit to reach the sea on 6 June.

Around 156,000 men were ashore. Allied casualties on the day are usually estimated at about 10,000, of whom some 4,400 were killed; more than 2,000 of the total fell at Omaha alone.

The 50th Division entered Bayeux unopposed; the garrison had pulled out overnight. It was the first substantial French town liberated and came through undamaged, which made it the natural administrative centre for the British sector.

47 Royal Marine Commando took Port-en-Bessin, closing the last gap between the American and British sectors. From this point the lodgement was continuous from the Vire estuary to the Orne, save for the Carentan gap in the west.

Concrete Phoenix caissons towed from England began to be positioned off Arromanches for Mulberry B and off Saint-Laurent for Mulberry A, building two artificial harbours from nothing on an open coast.

21st Army Group established its forward headquarters in Normandy. With Caen holding out, Montgomery began shaping the campaign around drawing German armour onto the British and Canadian sector in the east, so the Americans could break out in the west where the defence was thinner.

By the close of D+5 roughly 326,000 men, 54,000 vehicles and over 100,000 tons of stores had been landed. Operation Perch was under way south of Bayeux, seeking a way round Caen from the west.

The 101st Airborne Division took Carentan after four days of fighting along the exposed causeway approaches, joining the Utah and Omaha beachheads into a single line some fifty miles wide.

The 7th Armoured Division, sent round the western flank of Panzer Lehr to unhinge Caen, was halted in the streets of Villers-Bocage. A small number of Tigers of 101st SS Heavy Panzer Battalion, led by Michael Wittmann, destroyed a large part of a column of 22nd Armoured Brigade in a short and one-sided action.

General de Gaulle landed at Courseulles and went on to Bayeux, where he spoke in the square and appointed a commissioner of the Republic, presenting the Free French provisional government as the lawful authority in liberated France before the Allies had formally recognised it.

US VII Corps turned west across the neck of the Cotentin, aiming to reach the Atlantic coast and cut off Cherbourg. The 9th Infantry Division led, moving faster than the German command could form a line across the peninsula.

South of Carentan and Isigny, US divisions entered the hedgerow country in earnest. Each field was enclosed by an earth bank several feet thick, rooted with hedge and often sunk between banked lanes, giving a prepared position every hundred yards, invisible from the air and impassable to tanks except through gates covered by anti-tank guns.

US VII Corps reached the west coast of the Cotentin at Barneville, sealing the peninsula and isolating the Cherbourg garrison from the rest of the German army in France.

With the peninsula cut, VII Corps swung north with three divisions abreast towards Cherbourg. Montgomery issued a directive confirming the two-part shape of the campaign: take Cherbourg to get a port, hold the German armour in the east.

A north-easterly gale, the worst in the Channel in forty years, blew for three days. It wrecked Mulberry A off Omaha beyond repair, damaged Mulberry B at Arromanches, drove some 800 craft ashore and stopped unloading almost completely.

VII Corps closed up to the landward fortifications of Cherbourg, a belt of forts, ditches and pillboxes built to face inland. A formal demand for surrender was broadcast and refused.

After a preparatory attack by rocket-firing Typhoons and fighter-bombers, three American divisions attacked the landward defences. Progress was slow through concrete and minefields, and the fighting inside the perimeter lasted four days.

The battleships USS Texas, Arkansas and Nevada, with cruisers and destroyers, closed the coast to engage the batteries covering Cherbourg. The batteries fired back with accuracy: Texas took a hit on her navigating bridge, and several ships were damaged.

General von Schlieben surrendered the city, with resistance in the arsenal and outer forts continuing for several more days and the Cap de la Hague only cleared on 1 July. Overlord's original plan had counted on Cherbourg as the lodgement's deep-water port.

VIII Corps attacked south-west of Caen to cross the Odon and the Orne and turn the city from the west. The offensive drove a narrow salient, the Scottish Corridor, as far as Hill 112, in rain that grounded much of the air support.

Generaloberst Friedrich Dollmann, commanding Seventh Army, died at his headquarters as the Epsom battle reached its height, officially of a heart attack, though suicide has long been suspected. He had been facing a court-martial inquiry over the loss of Cherbourg.

Epsom was closed down and Hill 112 abandoned. After twenty-four days the Allies held a lodgement roughly seventy miles wide and, at its deepest, some twenty miles inland, well short of the phase lines the planners had drawn, and containing far more men and materiel than the ground could comfortably hold.

Rundstedt was dismissed as Commander-in-Chief West and replaced by Field Marshal Günther von Kluge. Asked by Keitel what should be done, he is widely reported to have answered: make peace, you fools.

The Canadian 3rd Division attacked Carpiquet and its airfield on the western edge of Caen, held by 12th SS Panzer Division. The village fell; the airfield hangars and their concrete strongpoints did not, and held out several more days.

British and Canadian troops entered the northern half of Caen after a heavy bomber attack that killed several hundred French civilians and choked the streets with rubble, hindering the advance it was meant to assist.

43rd (Wessex) Division attacked to retake Hill 112, the low chalk rise between the Odon and the Orne from which artillery observers could see across most of the southern approaches to Caen. Both sides understood that whoever held it controlled the ground.

Rommel's staff car was strafed by Allied fighters on a road near Livarot. He was thrown from the vehicle with a fractured skull and did not return to duty.

Three armoured divisions attacked south-east of Caen behind the heaviest air bombardment yet used in support of ground troops. They gained around seven miles and lost heavily to anti-tank guns and dug-in armour sited in depth on the Bourguébus ridge.

Around 1,500 heavy bombers saturated a narrow rectangle of front west of Saint-Lô, destroying much of Panzer Lehr as a fighting formation. Some bombs fell short into American lines, killing well over a hundred men including Lieutenant General Lesley McNair, the most senior American officer killed in the European theatre.

Coutances was taken and the German left flank in Normandy disintegrated. American armoured columns began moving in road march rather than fighting field by field.

The 4th Armored Division took Avranches and the bridge at Pontaubault, the hinge between Normandy and Brittany. Through a corridor only a few miles wide, seven divisions were pushed south in seventy-two hours.

Patton's Third Army became operational and Bradley took command of the new 12th Army Group. Montgomery remained in overall ground command for the time being.

On Hitler's direct order, four panzer divisions attacked west towards Avranches to cut the corridor through which Third Army was pouring south and east.

First Canadian Army attacked south from Caen towards Falaise at night, with infantry carried in improvised armoured personnel carriers converted from self-propelled gun hulls, called the Kangaroo, and the beginning of mechanised infantry as later understood.

A second Allied invasion of France came ashore between Toulon and Cannes: US VI Corps and French Army B, against defences stripped to feed Normandy. Marseille and Toulon were captured within a fortnight and became the Allies' most productive ports in France.

Canadian troops entered Falaise as the pocket tightened. Kluge, out of radio contact for a day while pinned under air attack and suspected by Hitler of trying to negotiate a surrender, was relieved and replaced by Model. He took poison on the road home two days later.

Canadian, Polish, British and American forces closed the gap between Trun and Chambois. The Polish 1st Armoured Division held Hill 262, known as Maczuga or the Mace, astride the escape route for two days, cut off and attacked from both directions, without resupply.

The French 2nd Armoured Division under General Leclerc, with the US 4th Infantry Division, entered a city already in insurrection. General von Choltitz surrendered the garrison and did not carry out the order to destroy the bridges and monuments.

Allied forces crossed the Seine and Operation Overlord formally ended, eleven days ahead of the phase line the planners had drawn for D+90.