Eighty Years Ago “Operation Overlord”

Last updated on June 7, 2024

…

Come and stand in memory
Of men who fought and died
They gave their lives in Normandy
Remember them with pride.

Soldiers, Airman, sailors
Airborne and marines
Who in civvy life were tailors
and men who worked machines.

British and Canadian
And men from USA
Forces from the Commonwealth
They all were there that day

To Juno, Sword and Utah
Beaches of renown
Also Gold and Omaha
That’s where the ramps went down.

The battle raged in Normandy
Many lives were lost
The war must end in victory
And this must be the cost

When my life is over
And I reach the other side
I’ll meet my friends from Normandy
And shake their hands with pride.

‘Normandy’ by Juno Veteran Cyril Crain 

Eighty years ago!

At a conference in Washington in May 1943, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to invade France in the spring of 1944. The assault on the “Fortress Europe” declared by the National Socialists by opening a Western Front was intended to cause a rapid military collapse of Germany. The Allies used the year to transfer large contingents of troops from the USA and Canada to Great Britain, to assemble a huge armada for the landing troops under the command of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

With over 3,100 landing crafts, the first wave of the invading army crossed from Great Britain to France on the night of 6th of June 1944. Under the fire protection of 1,200 warships and 7,500 aircraft, around 150,000 Americans, British, French, Poles as well as Canadians and other Commonwealth members landed at dawn on five different beaches in Normandy. At the same time, paratroopers and airborne troops took control of important strategic points in the backcountry. On the 12th of June, around 330,000 Allied soldiers with 54,000 vehicles succeeded in connecting the five landing heads to form a contiguous front 100 kilometers long and 30 kilometers deep.

At that time, Hitler still considered the invasion of Normandy to be a deceptive maneuver. Although he and the Wehrmacht leadership had long expected an Allied landing operation, they suspected it happening at the English Channel’s narrowest point near Calais. It was there that the Germans had expanded the “Atlantic Wall” the most, and it was there that the majority of the 58 German divisions stationed in the West were located under the Commander-in-Chief West, Gerd von Rundstedt. The Landing in the Normandy therefore caught the German Wehrmacht unprepared. In addition, the German weather reconnaissance had described a landing as impossible for the time, which led to considerable command complications, as some of the German commanders were in Paris for amusement. In the weeks that followed, confusing power structures and chaos of competencies within the Wehrmacht leadership paralyzed German countermeasures or the deployment of reserve units to Normandy.

When the Allied force increased to almost one million soldiers and 150,000 vehicles at the end of June and the extent of the invasion had become unmistakable, Hitler still refused to send reinforcements from eastern France to the German units fighting in Normandy. At this point, there was no longer any doubt about the success of the invasion. Sabotage actions by the French Resistance had severely disrupted the German transport and communication network. While the Allies had unrestricted naval and air supremacy, the German Army Group B under Erwin Rommel, which was fighting on the Atlantic coast, suffered from a considerable shortage of supplies. In addition, the German troops in Normandy were by no means battle-hardened, or they consisted partly of the “Eastern troops” recruited in the occupied Soviet territories. Their motivation to fight was limited, as was that of the Indian Legion of the Waffen-SS, which consisted of former prisoners of war who now had to fight in Normandy for a “Free India” independent of Great Britain.

Despite Allied superiority, the British-American attempt to go further into the country did not go as planned. Again and again, they were stopped by German infantry units, which exploited the confusing terrain to their own advantage or started to tenaciously defend individual villages. The strategically important port city of Cherbourg in the north of the Cotentin peninsula could not be taken by the Americans until the end of June. Caen was supposed to be conquered by the British on “D-Day”, the first day of the invasion, but the battle for the city lasted until mid-July 1944, and on July 31, the Americans finally broke through the German front at Avranches. The French hinterland was now open to the Allies for a large-scale war of movement and for the liberation of France.

Because of the Landing in Normandy, eleven months later Hitler, and his accomplices lost the war on September 2nd, 1945. The war was over and my grandmother, who had been hiding in the Austrian/Italian Alp because she was part Jewish, was free and could go back home to our farm.

This day is important to me, perhaps now more than ever. With democracy at stake all over the world, I turned on the TV in the morning to watch the memorial ceremony in Normandy. I studied the old faces of the remaining soldiers. Now between 97 and 103 years old, too fragile to stand, some of them too tired to stay awake, still they showed up to remember this day, eighty years ago.

May we never forget and continue to defend democracy and our freedom.

May we show up too!