D-Day
...Overlord” was the allied design to invade France and liberate Western Europe from Nazi tyranny; it began on D-Day, June 6, 1944. By the end of 1943, the Allies had won a series of victories that had changed the course of World War II. Yet the final defeat of Germany still seemed far away. The Russians had constantly pressed Britain and the United States to open a second front in Western Europe. American military leaders had favored an invasion of France almost from the time America had entered the war. After crossing France, the British and Americans could attack Germany from the west while the Russians closed in from the east. The planning for an invasion had been going on for years, but it had always been delayed. The British feared that an early invasion, before they were fully prepared, would result in many deaths and would end in disaster. They remembered the way the German army had defeated them in France in 1940, and they remembered the terrible bloodshed of World War I, when armies tried to attack built up positions.
Finally, in the month of April 1943, the restrictions of the civil trips in England, the intensification of the aerial attacks, and the picture of the lunar phases and the tides provided to the western top command the elements of a study that allowed them to determine a “safe way” to set the date of the disembarkation for May 18. For an unknown reason, the Allies let pass the propitious day and the date was moved to the month of August. At first from Greece to Norway, all the European coasts, including those of Spain and Portugal, were designated successively like front doors of the invasion of Europe. Cotentin was one of the most tempting zones for an invader. That way of seeing where the invasion would be had some contradictions since the navy, for example, eliminated Calvados as a possibility because of its rocks, the army thought that...
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