D-Day 6th of June.

On this day 76 years ago, the Anglo American armies landed on the French coast of Normandy and stood off a fierce German counter attack.  Then the allies drove forward and crushed the German armies in France, liberated Paris, and pushed into Germany.  This was a turning point in WWII, which had been raging for 5 years and had another year to go.  The Germans kicked off WWII by attacking and defeating Poland.  Then they proceeded to conquer Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. They drove the British into the sea at Dunkirk.  Fortunately the Germans never had the sea power needed to move their army across the English Channel. 

   At Churchill’s insistence, the British and the Americans were fighting the Germans in North Africa.  Churchill plainly saw that the British and American civilian populations would not put up with years of wartime privation without fighting the Germans.  Churchill sold his view to Roosevelt and Roosevelt ordered the American Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare and execute Operation Torch, an amphibious landing in North Africa going up against the Germans, under Rommel.  This meant a lot of heavy fighting until Eisenhower and Montgomery surrounded the Germans at the site of ancient Carthage and took them all prisoner.  The Anglo Americans took nearly as many German prisoners as the Russians had taken at Stalingrad, a few weeks before.

  But, the North African victory was something of a sideshow compared with Russians and the Germans who were going head to head with armies of several million men each.  Not until the successful Normandy landing did the Anglo Americans confront the Germans with as big an army as the Russians were doing.

   Fortunately D-Day was a success.  It could have been a terrible failure.  Things were so touchy that Eisenhower, the supreme commander, man with the best view of the operation, prepared a short speech to give in the event that he had to withdraw the troops and accept defeat.  On the day before D-Day the weather was so bad that the Allied nearly canceled the operation.  One brave and sincere weatherman convinced Eisenhower that the weather would lift that night making the landings possible.  As it worked out, the Normandy landings, except Omaha beach, were successful, the troops got ashore, got their armor and artillery ashore and emplaced before the German counter attack got rolling.  Even blood soaked Omaha beach was secured in the end.