D-Day was the day when one of the largest amphibious attacks in human history was launched by the Allied forces. At the time, the German forces controlled most of the mainland Europe. Allied forces planned to attack the northern French coasts along Normandy and gain a foothold on the mainland.
The attack began on D-Day, which was June 6, 1944. More than 300,000 Allied personnel participated in the D-Day attack. The attack finally began to turn the tide against Nazi Germany.
D-Day came about at a time when Nazi Germany was occupying or controlling most of central and Eastern Europe during World War II. France and mainland European Allied armies had been successfully defeated. So Britain and United States now spearheaded the Allied cause.
Germans expected the Allies to launch an assault on German-occupied Europe. However, they weren’t sure where this assault would take place. This confusion proved critical to the success of the Allies.
Operation Overlord was an elaborate plan by the Allies to attack German position along Normandy and then push inland. D-Day was the famous day on which this operation was launched.
The day was June 6, 1944 when a huge number of Allied airborne and seaborne troops launched the attack. On the Allied side, it involves around 5,000 vessels, 4,000 landing crafts, 59 block-ships, nearly a thousand minesweepers and more than 800 merchant ships.
Launched in June, the Allied troops had successfully gained a foothold on the French Normandy coasts by August.
Operation Bodyguard was the code name of a fake operation. The Allied created the impression of this operation in order to deceive the Germans. To create this deception, the Allied troops created an entire fake army complete with inflatable airplanes and misleading radio transmissions. Double agents were also used to feed fake information to the Germans.
This deception worked brilliantly. It convinced the Germans that the Allied forces intended to land troops in Norway instead of Normandy. The deception gave Allied the time to make significant advances in Normandy before the German defensive forces could be mobilized.
D-Day was on June 6, 1944 when the Allied assault began. Progress was slow but steady. By August, 1944, the Allied troops had advanced sufficiently to liberate Paris and get northwestern France back from German control.
Success of the Allied troops began to turn the tide against the German forces. Soon bereft of their occupied territories in France, German armies were soon forced to fight for their homeland.
The Soviet pushed in from the east and the Allied troops from the west. Anticipating the imminent defeat, the German armies agreed to surrender. A formal declaration of surrender was signed in May, 1945.
Hitler committed suicide to prevent capture by the enemy forces. The surrender and Hitler’s death effectively marked the end of the war with Allied victory.
Learn more about the D-Day attacks at Wikipedia