Even after 80 years people remember D-Day. Adrian Goldsworthy, author of Hill 112, which is set during the Normandy landings, examines why we do — and dispels some myths surrounding this memorable turning point in the Second World War.
D-Day. 6 June, 1944, Operation Overlord and the invasion of France by the Western Allies led by Britain and the USA. The 80th anniversary will fall this year, with widespread commemoration, especially in Normandy itself, although with pitifully few veterans left from among those who were there. People with only the remotest idea of what the Second World War was about have probably heard of D-Day.
The irony is that the Normandy landings were never originally the D-Day. The term simply stood for the day on which a military operation would start, like T for time, so that a minus number meant before the moment and a plus afterwards.
It was a more reliable system for planning than actual dates, partly for security, but more because dates might change with the circumstances, just as the Normandy landings were postponed by 24 hours due to adverse weather.
The Western Allies had a lot of D-Days during the Second World War. That this was the largest, in terms of sheer numbers and the vast range of different elements contributing to it, made it exceptional.
In addition, the story was dramatic enough, with years of planning and preparation, gathering the forces, supplies and equipment in Britain, and creating the means of carrying it all and then supporting waves across the Channel.
The sheer scale of the logistics involved remain staggering. Over 7,000 vessels, from warships to landing craft great and small, were used on 6 June. Nothing quite like this has ever happened since, and it is very hard to imagine it happening again, at least in the same way. Massed paratrooper landings are not something envisaged by modern militaries, nor would they even dream of sending their soldiers to battle in flimsy wooden gliders.
The Normandy landings were enormous and they were certainly dramatic. There was the complex and highly successful deception plan which helped to convince Hitler that Normandy was a diversion and the real attack was to come at the Pas de Calais. This involved double agents and the creation of a fictitious Army Group commanded by George Patton.
There was the last minute crisis when the weather turned bad, the delay, and finally the decision, which ultimately rested on Eisenhower’s shoulders, to go on 6 June with a forecast that was far from perfect.
The gamble paid off, as did so many others, and by the end of the day the Allies were established inshore from all five of the chosen invasion beaches. Even Omaha, the toughest nut to crack, had been taken in spite of a heavy toll in lives. D-Day was over, but D+1 followed and so on, and there was some ten weeks of bitter fighting against determined and skilful German defenders before the Allies broke out.
Soon afterwards Paris was liberated, and less than a year later, Hitler was dead and Nazi Germany broken, so that the Second World War in the West was over.
By 1944 the numbers in terms of men and material were all decisively set against Hitler’s Germany — facing the Russians on one side and the Western Allies on the other. That did not mean that the Nazis were about to give in any time soon.
The Normandy landings had to happen so that the Allied armies could confront and break Germany’s armies in the field. Without it there was no liberation of Western Europe.
If, in Churchill’s memorable phrase, El Alamein was the “end of the beginning”, 6 June, 1944, well deserves to be called the ‘beginning of the end.’ Once it succeeded, and the Allies had fought off the German attempts to drive them back into the sea, then it was only a matter of time before the Nazis were defeated.
The Normandy landings did not achieve this on their own. Plenty of other D-Days – in Sicily, at Salerno and Anzio, and later Operation Dragoon in Southern France or the Rhine crossing – had to happen to make this possible. So did the bombing campaign, let alone whatever term the Soviet staff used in their planning for their offensives, notably Operation Bagration which began a few weeks after D-Day.
The Normandy landings could not have taken place if the Wehrmacht had not already been bled to the point of death in Russia, while Bagration succeeded so well because the tank reserves that might have blunted it were at the other end of Europe, trying and failing to stop the British, Americans and Canadians in Normandy.
The Second World War was an allied victory in every sense of the word, a vast conflict made up of many different strands, but popular memory does not like complexity. As events recede in time, they tend to be reduced to caricatures. The First World War is for many all about trenches, mud and rats, with every battle the appalling – and futile — slaughter of the first day of the Somme.
Even more distant, the Crimea is little more than Florence Nightingale, and perhaps still the Charge of the Light Brigade, and for those educated more recently Mary Seacole. All these people and aspects were real, if the perception is over simplified, and all are worth remembering. It is just that there was a lot more to it all than this.
D-Day was very important and deserves to be remembered. Cinema helps, with The Longest Day frequently shown on TV, and more recently Saving Private Ryan which did a lot to crystallise memory of the carnage on Omaha beach, which has in a way expanded to become a reminder of the wider cost – in other theatres and on land, sea and air – of defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
The Americans played a major role on 6 June, which understandably means that D-Day has resonance in the USA and makes on-screen depictions more likely. Until part way through the Normandy campaign, the British contribution was comparable in terms of numbers, although from then on it would shrink while the American contribution grew.
D-Day mattered. There was a lot more to the Battle for Normandy than this one day, and far, far more to the story of the wider war, but the ingenuity, courage, skill, luck and cost of 6 June make it as good a shorthand memory for 1939–1945 as any.
Hill 112 by Adrian Goldsworthy is published on 23 May, 2024.
Adrian is the author of a number of books about the history of Rome’s Republic and Empire, as well as two fiction series, one set during the Peninsular War and the second following the fortunes of centurion Titus Flavius Ferox. Hill 112 is a new departure, written to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings and to throw some light on the subject.
Other Historia features on related topics include:
The women agents behind the D-Day invasion by Mara Timon
From Taranto to Pearl Harbor – spies and inspiration by Alan Bardos
The French Resistance: shadier than you think by Chris Lloyd
Don’t mention the war! by Keith Lowe
The fight for our battlefields by Tim Lynch
John F Kennedy, the ambassador’s second son by Susan Ronald
Down the rabbit hole – to kill Hitler by Eric Lee
Historia interviews: 2021 Non-fiction Crown Award winner Alan Allport, author of Britain at Bay, by Frances Owen
And our review of D-Day: The Last Heroes, written by AL Berridge
Images (unless otherwise stated, from the Imperial War Museum and under the IWM Non-Commercial Licence):
- Into the Jaws of Death — US Troops wading through water and Nazi gunfire by Robert F Sargent, 6 June, 1944: Records of the US Coast Guard (NAID 355) via Wikimedia (public domain)
- “When they call us D-Day Dodgers – which D-Day do they mean, old man?” by Jon, 1944: © IWM ART 15548 5
- Men of 22nd Independent Parachute Company, 6th Airborne Division being briefed for the invasion, 4–5 June, 1944: © IWM H 39089
- Film still showing commandos of No 4 Commando, 1st Special Service Brigade, aboard a LCI(S) landing craft on their approach to Queen Red beach, Sword area, 6 June, 1944: © IWM BU 1181
- Troops of the US 7th Corps wading ashore on Utah Beach, 6 June, 1944: © IWM EA 51048
- Tous Ensemble, pour une Seule Victoire (poster): © IWM PST 15707
