Nine Allied Divisions are ashore---a total of 133,000 troops have landed in Normandy.
By the numbers:
7000 ships and landing crafts brought the majority of the invasion force to France
195,000 naval personnel attended those ships and landing crafts
eight Allied countries provided the naval personnel
1200 airplanes were used to drop airborne troops
700 gliders
over 1000 bombers completed raids on the beachhead and other strategic locations in Normandy and along the French coastline.
nearly 30,000 vehicles of all sorts---and yes that includes tanks and other armored cavalry---were transported to France on this day.
But the most important number of all is that over 10,000soldiers
had been killed or were wounded---almost eight percent of the soldiers
who had landed---at Normandy. Success, it seems, always has a cost
attached to it. By the end of June:
- Over 850,000 men
- 148,000 vehicles
- 586,000
tons of supplies had landed at Normandy.
Operation Overlord was an astoundingly simple plan. An enormous
undertaking yes, but the overall plan was simple. Drop the Airborne and
have the gliders come in first to secure vital bridges, take out German
defenses and to cover the flanks. Assemble the ships in the Channel.
Send the ships out to their respective beaches. Load the landing
crafts. Land the tanks. Land the men. Move everything inland. Push the
Germans back. It's often said that the only difference between genius
and insanity is if the idea is successful: it's genius if it works;
insanity if it doesn't. The details involved with all that simplicity
are mindboggling. So much so that the genius/insanity rule kicks in. By
all rights Operation Overlord should have fallen apart. Its success
hinged on so many factors coming together correctly, that it should have fallen apart as the laws of probability seemed to demand that it would.
Yet it didn’t.
It worked.
Hence it was genius, and not madness.
By the end of D-Day, while the hold on the Cotenin peninsula and the Beaches was tenuous, it was still a hold.
The Allies were there. A third front had been established in Fortress
Europa. Within a year, Hitler and his Third Reich would be brought to
their knees, courtesy of this three pronged attack, of which the
landings in Normandy were the final nail into the war in Europe's
coffin. On paper or a sand table it seems an overwhelmingly simple
plan, but it wasn’t. And it couldn’t have been simple for the men
on the ground, either. The absolute humilty of D-Day vets has always
struck me. They knew they were taking part in something so much greater
than they were, but they never got illusions of grandeur, which is odd,
given what they achieved. They knew they were just one small part in
the big war, to steal a line from Bill Guarnere. They were there to do
their job. Thousands and thousands of men who had had tasks assigned to
them. Some failed; some were successful; some lived while many died,
but they did their jobs nonetheless and the combined result meant that
the war would end---sometime soon. They didn't know when it would end;
all they knew at that point in time was that they'd made progress
toward that goal. One small part in the great big war. Amazing, isn’t it, what
all those small parts on June 6, 1944 achieved?
Thank you.