D-Day

"On the evening of June 6, 1944, over five thousand ships carrying 150,000 soldiers, the

greatest armada ever assembled, left southern England for the invasion f Normandy. In the

morning, across the English Channel, a great battle would begin for the liberation of Europe."

--New York Times [Document I]

In the spring of 1943 the American ships began to arrive in great numbers in England. Some troops had seen combat in North Africa and Sicily, but most were untested, fresh from the training camps of North America. They were here to join an Allied army to become part of the largest invasion force in history. Seeing them, the British were encouraged by their numbers. The island had been at war for four long years and now the Americans had arrived. The war had been going on since 1939 and they were tired. Their soldiers had been fighting a very long and difficult war. On January 16, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in England to assume supreme command of the Allied expeditionary forces. He had not led troops to combat, but he possessed an extraordinary talent for planning and military diplomacy. According to Document C, Eisenhower faced a task of magnitude and hazard never previously attempted. He motivates his people with a few words of encouragement and truthfully let them know what is at stake and what lies upon their shoulders. He knew that weapon for weapon, tank for tank, save transport and artillery, the Germans outclassed his army, an army he would have to move up to 100 miles across the English Channel and storm a heavily fortified coastline as seen in Document H, a map of northern France and its coast bordering the English Channel. Added to this, he would also have to endure a difficult British commander and keep a balanced mind toward his real adversary.

The man the Allied forces would have to face on the beaches of Normandy was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, one of the most brilliant generals of the war. In Document G he is drawn as a cartoon with a noble and simply honest face. His arms are crossed with one fist over his heart. His pose conveys honorable and respectful essence. However, in December of 1943, he was appointed by Hitler to command German army units in northern France, to hurl back the Allies if they landed there. Inspecting the huge fortifications at Calais less than 30 miles across the English Channel from Britain, he found the defenses formidable. The beaches of Normandy, however, were a different matter. The high tides and treacherous cliffs were to his advantage, but the guns and fortifications at Normandy were too few and far between. A picture of the beach is photographed in Document D. It is pictured as a dark and gloomy field filled with smoke that is non-reminiscent of a beach at all. Still, Normandy was 70 miles from Britain, and moving an army that distance over difficult seas implied great risks. The only hope that Rommel had was to have a force ready to move immediately towards the spot where anybody landed. He immediately ordered the emplacement of tens of thousands of underwater obstacles, and though he intended to inflict heavy casualties on the landing craft, he was convinced success lay in attacking the enemy with armor on the beaches.

Much of the success of the first day would depend on the skill and bravery of small groups of men able to take things into their own hands, but there was no mistaking where the advantage of the Allies lay-- the immense magnitude of their weapons. The man alone in Britain in the spring of 1944 was General George S. Patton, Document F. Document F features a vibrant and colorful poster promoting Patton's image, as he quotes a memorable quote, "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country; he won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country..." This quote was ironic because he had been assigned to lead an army that did not exist and this plan was indeed not dumb, it was just the opposite--deceiving and brilliant. Patton was in command of a fictitious army intended to deceive the Germans into believing it was going to invade France at Calais. The Patton deception worked in great part because of what the British had accomplished earlier in the war. Behind Blechley House, a Victorian mansion north of London, stood Hut 6. Here a team of British and American cryptographers deciphered coded messages -- codes the Germans believed unbreakable. The Americans were doing an enormous amount of eavesdropping. We had indications where the enemy was, what he was doing, the reaction of Hitler to various things and the arguments going on. We knew almost exactly what they were doing. But the Germans were doing things on the Norman beaches the Allies knew little about, and Allied commandos, some of them foreign nationals, were put ashore at night to find out. They took infrared pictures while avoiding German patrols. Equally important was the information radioed to Britain at personal risk by the Maquis, the free French who were being supplied by the Allies at night.

In the early spring of 1944, orders went out to the Allied airfields to target the French railroads