Countdown
1 May 1944
Eisenhower and Ramsay, aware Rommel is strengthening the Atlantic Wall (by D-Day 6.5 million mines are laid along the approaches) and covering the beaches with below-the-water obstacles, decide that the landings will be in daylight and at low tide, so that the obstacles will be visible. A daylight landing also increases the accuracy of air and naval bombardment.
2–6 May 1944
Fabius, final rehearsal for Overlord at Slapton Sands.
8 May 1944
SHAEF selects 5 June as D-Day. HM The King, General Eisenhower, Field Marshal Smuts and others attend conference at General Montgomery’s St Paul’s HQ to review the final plans for Overlord.
US troops aboard a LCT bound for Utah Beach.
U.S Navy
Lieutenant General
George S. Patton
commander, Third United States Army.
‘We won’t just shoot the sons-abitches, we are going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.’
Winston Churchill
to his wife Clementine on the eve of D – Day.
‘Do you realize that by the time you wake up in the morning, 20,000 men may have been killed?’
General Feldmarsohall Erwin Rommel
‘We’ll have only one chance to stop the enemy and that’s while he’s in the water. Everything we have must be on the coast . . . the first 24 hours of the invasion will be decisive. For the Allies as well as Germany, it will be the longest day.’
General Feldmarschall von Rundstedt
‘The Atlantic Wall was a myth . . . any resolute assault was bound to make a breakthrough anywhere along it in a day at most.’
Adolf Hitler
Führer.
‘If we do not stop the invasion and drive the enemy back into the sea, the war will be lost.’
General Dwight
D. Eisenhower’s
prepared speech in the event D – Day did not succeed.
‘Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. (The troops have been withdrawn).
‘My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. If any blame or fault attaches to this attempt, it is mine alone.’
Ron Mailey
4th AGRA Signals, in a holding battalion in Kent.
‘On the morning of 6 June we heard o the radio that a large force of both our troops and the Americans had succssfully landed on the beaches near Caen and Bayeux and also further down the coast towards Cherbourg. This was very good news and we felt that it would make up for the defeat in 1940 in which I had taken part. Immediately our own Battalion was mobilized, and we departed for Southampton. In hindsight, Hitler was our greatest ally. He made the mistake of thinkin our attack was a diversionary one and that the main attack was to come in the Pas-de-Calais area. It was a mistake he repeated many times in the war and, perhaps, had he left it to his generals, we may have lost, instead of won.’
Gunner Alfred Sewell
124 Light AA Regiment RA, Lewes, Sussex.
‘We were on guns at dawn on 6 June watching huge fleets of planes and gliders bound for France. We were warned to expect dive-bombers, rockets and God knows what. We prayed for the boys going over. Overlord had begun.’
British LCAs with US LCIs behind.
Roy Clark
Panzer Leutnant Günter Halm
‘I was asleep when the invasion began. The first bombardment started at about 01:00, and it was so loud and shocking that all of us knew instantly it was something out of the ordinary. I shot out of bed and went straight to the battalion staff quarters to organize my men. Then we hung around until 07:00, waiting for orders. Feldmarschall Rommel was away and so was our divisional commander so there was no one to give orders. We were told to push on to the coast in our armoured personnel carriers and we had almost got there when we fell upon English troops. I’ve no idea to this day who they were but they were on foot. During that night, my battalion lost three-quarters of the men. I’ve no doubt that if we had not wasted those valuable first hours waiting for orders, we could have pushed the Allies back right away. Those hours from 01:00 to 0:700 were critical and our tanks were left idle for too long.’
Andre Heintz, 23
French Resistance fighter.
‘I shall never forget that night or the thrill of knowing the Allies were coming to expel the Nazis at last. My mother woke up in the early hours when she first heard the noise and said, “It must be the landings.” But I dared not confirm it, even to her, because I knew that the Germans thought it might be a diversionary tactic. So I told my own mother nothing. In the morning a friend called and told me the sea was black with ships. Then the bombing began. I was helping to take the injured to our local hospital, which was run by nuns, but there was nothing to distinguish it from other buildings the Germans had been using. We couldn’t paint a red cross because the Germans had requisitioned all the paint so the nuns brought out the sheets, red with blood, that had been in use in the operating theatre and we spread them out in a cross.
‘I’ll never forget the next RAF plane to fly over us. It waggled its wings, and we all knew it had worked. The bombing stopped in our area.’
Civilian June Telford
‘I was catching a bus to work when I noticed things where different. Usually the town was full of commandos and as I stood there, wondering what was different, it came to me . . . silence. There were no boots, no troops, not even the usual singing. We were planting tomato plants on the farm, so we didn’t miss anything in the air over the Isle of Wight. We saw the planes returning, some on fire, and some with smoke pouring from them and many spaces in their formations.’
Countdown
18 May 1944
German