Farley

Eighty years ago this month, British and American military leaders were making final preparations for what was to become the largest seaborn operation in history: Operation Overlord, popularly known as D-Day, the long-anticipated invasion of Europe. Since Overlord is arguably the most crucial military operation of the 20th century, a review of how it came together is definitely in order.

The story of Overlord begins in the second year of World War II, on June 22, 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Those two nations had signed a non-aggression pact in 1939 but Adolf Hitler had long planned to double cross Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in his campaign to enlarge the Nazi empire. The news of the attack was cheered by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose nation to date had stood alone in defiance of Hitler.

Now he could offer Stalin an alliance and force Hitler into a two-front war. Being forced to fight in the west and east for four years had doomed Germany to defeat in the Great War some 23 years earlier. When Hitler declared war on the United States in December 1941, after Pearl Harbor, prospects for defeating Nazi Germany looked even brighter. The mobilization of the formidable U.S. war machine augured well for Hitler’s eventual demise.

The two-front strategy called for the Soviet Union to push Nazi Germany out of Soviet territory, across occupied Eastern Europe to Berlin. The U.S, Britain and assorted others would invade France, clear western Europe of Nazis and then rendezvous in Berlin with Soviet forces to crush what remained of Nazi Germany.

Stalin demanded an immediate invasion, to relieve some pressure from the four Nazi armies besieging his country. Unfortunately, the U.S. and Britain were in no position to implement this plan in 1942. They did not have air superiority — the German Luftwaffe ruled the skies. Nazi U-boats prowled the seas around Britain, and Nazi occupiers had constructed formidable defenses all along the northern French coast.

The U.S. was just getting started mobilizing its industrial might and mustering up enough troops to fight both in Europe and the Pacific. Given these realities, the US and British leadership decided on a joint invasion of North Africa for 1942, followed by an invasion of Italy. This would force the diversion at least some Nazi forces from the Soviet Union and buy preparation time for the main event, the large-scale invasion of Europe. Meanwhile, American and British air corps and navies would gradually win control of the air and seas.

By November 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill could begin planning what would become Operation Overlord. It would launch in late May or early June 1944 and proceed from Southern England to a section of French coast across the English Channel.

Among the first tasks facing the commander of Overlord, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, was site selection. A glance at the map revealed that Calais was an obvious choice for the landings because of its proximity to England. But the Nazi defenders knew this too, so the objective became a stretch of beach in Normandy, farther west, an apparently unlikely choice because there were no ports nearby to service transport and supply ships. The Nazis did not know that the Allies would bring their own makeshift ports, called Mulberries.

In the spring of 1944, as thousands of troops began to stream into southern England, the Allies were preoccupied with two key issues. First, how to go about hiding the invasion force? It would be impossible to conceal a huge concentration of troops and materiel, but they could be positioned in such a way as to confuse the enemy.

The planners addressed this by spacing out troops and equipment from Plymouth in the south all the way up the east coast of England. This would make it imperative for the Nazis to spread their defenses thinner. They knew they had to be ready for an invasion that could come anywhere along the French channel coast, or even as far north as Norway.

Double agents operating in Britain and France reinforced the message that the invasion could come anywhere in the region. Then the timing of the operation had to be obscured somehow. Gen. Eisenhower and team helped achieve this by sending a dead ringer for the commander of British forces, Gen. Bernard Montgomery, to Gibraltar a few days before debarkation. Surely the operation would not launch while the commander of British forces was away on assignment.

In the first days of June, all was in readiness for Overlord. Next month, you will hear from two veterans who lived those fateful first hours of the invasion of Europe.