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Normandy Invasion, June 1944
Normandy Invasion, June 1944
Normandy Invasion, also called Operation Overlord or D-Day, during World War II, the Allied invasion of western Europe, which was launched on June 6, 1944 (the most celebrated D-Day of the war), with the simultaneous landing of U.S., British, and Canadian forces on five separate beachheads in Normandy, France.
On D-Day (the projected first day of the invasion), two American airborne divisions were to land behind the western end of the assault area and one British at the eastern, while amphibious armour was to swim ashore with the leading waves. The Americans constituted the U.S. First Army under Major General Omar Bradley, the British and Canadians the British Second Army under General Miles Dempsey. The British divisions had been under intensive training since 1942, the U.S. since 1943.
Meanwhile, intensive logistics preparations provided, by May 1944, almost 6,500 ships and landing craft, which would land nearly 200,000 vehicles and 600,000 tons of supplies in the first three weeks of the operation. The invasion would be further supported by more than 13,000 fighter, bomber, and transport aircraft, against which the Luftwaffe (the German air force) was able to deploy fewer than 400 on D-Day. Between April 1 and June 5, 1944, the British and American strategic air forces deployed 11,000 aircraft, flew 200,000 sorties, and dropped 195,000 tons of bombs on French rail centres and road networks as well as German airfields, radar installations, military bases, and coastal artillery batteries. Two thousand Allied aircraft were lost in these preliminaries, but the air campaign succeeded in breaking all the bridges across the Seine and Loire rivers and thus isolating the invasion area from the rest of France.
On the morning of June 5, General Dwight Eisenhower, commander of Allied Forces in Europe, announced, “O.K. We’ll go.” Within hours an armada of 3,000 landing craft, 2,500 other ships, and 500 naval vessels—escorts and bombardment ships—began to leave English ports. That night 822 aircraft, carrying parachutists or towing gliders, roared overhead to the Normandy landing zones. They were a fraction of the air armada of 13,000 aircraft that would support D-Day.
The airborne troops were the vanguard, and their landings were a heartening success. The American 82nd and 101st airborne divisions, dropping into a deliberately inundated zone at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula, suffered many casualties by drowning but nevertheless secured their objective. The British 6th Airborne Division seized its unflooded objectives at the eastern end more easily, and its special task force also captured key bridges over the Caen Canal and Orne River. When the seaborne units began to land about 6:30 am on June 6, the British and Canadians on Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches overcame light opposition. So did the Americans at Utah. The U.S. 1st Division at Omaha Beach, however, confronted the best of the German coast divisions, the 352nd, and was roughly handled by machine gunners as the troops waded ashore. During the morning, the landing at Omaha threatened to fail. Only dedicated local leadership eventually got the troops inland—though at a cost of more than 2,000 casualties. By the end of they day, over 4,000 Allied troops were dead, totaling over 10,000 casualties.
One of the surviving photos by Robert Capa of the landing of American troops on Omaha Beach during D-Day
The Payoff: A beachhead that made the liberation of France possible was established.
Battle of Iwo Jima, 1945
Battle of Iwo Jima, 1945
Iwo Jima is located about 760 miles (1,220 km) from Tokyo. It is a small island covering an area of about 8 square miles (20 square km) and spanning about 5 miles (8 km) in length. A volcanic island, Iwo Jima is dotted with hundreds of caves and is covered with volcanic sand and ash. At the southwest tip of the island is Mount Suribachi, a largely dormant volcano that provides a sweeping view of most of the island. Two beaches flank the northwest and southeast parts of the western sector. At the time of the U.S. invasion, there were two airfields in the middle of the island; a third airfield to the north was unfinished.
In May 1944 Japanese Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki had sent seasoned Lieut. Gen. Kuribayashi Tadamichi to organize the defense of Iwo Jima. Despite the apparent futility of resistance, Kuribayashi resolved to make the United States bleed for its victory.
He began by ordering the construction of a tunnel network beneath the island to provide both protection and a means to circumvent enemy lines. He then had his troops erect hundreds of pillboxes, blockhouses, and gun sites for aboveground coverage, many of which were so well constructed that only a direct hit from a battleship could cause serious damage. However, rather than heavily defending the coastline, he planned to keep his soldiers in caves and tunnels until the Americans advanced far enough inland to be decimated by coordinated infantry and artillery fire. Finally, in a break from traditional Japanese defensive strategy, Kuribayashi gave his men strict orders to abandon the often-suicidal banzai charges and instead kill 10 Americans each from their hideouts. By the time U.S. forces initiated their assault, Kuribayashi’s Iwo Jima garrison had grown to an estimated 21,000 soldiers.
"God, if you save my life I'll go to church every Sunday of my life--never miss"
(Corporal Jerry Copeland, as he spent his first night on Iwo Jima in a foxhole with two American corpses and four dead Japanese)
Nimitz created a U.S. Joint Expeditionary Force of Navy and Marines to carry out Operation Detachment. At its disposal was an armada of warships that were intended to soften up Japanese defenses with sustained bombardment. An American watching the prelanding bombardment said: We all figured nothing could live through that, and the carrier planes were giving it hell, too." But the defenders were well prepared and deeply dug in. Carnage was severe--proportionally worse than that on D-Day: at nightfall, 30,000 marines were ashore, but 566 were already dead or dying. The living trudged up volcanic ash up to their knees, in a moonscape devoid of cover; a rainstorm worsened their plight.
A marine, Joseph Raspilair, wrote "In all my life I do not think I have been as miserable as I was that night. All you could do was lay in the water and wait for morning so you could get out of the hole."
Weeks of painful fighting followed. Corporal George Wayman, a bazooka man, was in such pain from wounds as he lay for hours in a shellhole that he felt tempted to draw his bayonet and kill himself; he was eventually evacuated only after hours exposed to the Japanese fire that pounded the marine perimeter.
Replacement trudged forward to reinforce line units, where many were hit before even learning the names of their comrades. Lt. Patrick Caruso kidded one such young man about being underage; soon afterwards the boy was killed, after just two hours on the island, without unslinging his rifle from his shoulder or glimpsing the enemy. The defenders' ingenuity seemed boundless: a marine was amazed to see a hillside suddenly open before his eyes, to reveal three Japanese pushing out a field gun. It fired three rounds, then was dragged back into the cave. Mortars eventually destroyed the gun, but a hundred such positions had to be taken out before the defenses were overwhelmed. Officers learned to discourage men from seeking souvenirs, which the Japanese often booby-trapped. "The best souvenir you can take home is yourself," a laconic marine commander told his company.
Operation Detachment was one of the deadliest conflicts in U.S. Marine Corps history. The Japanese death toll approached 18,500 soldiers, and some 6,800 U.S. Marines were killed and 19,200 were wounded--one of the few times in the war where American casualties exceeded the Japanese. Twenty-seven Medals of Honor were awarded at the conclusion of the battle. The fact that Marines were forced to kill the Japanese virtually to the last man is a testament to the iron grip that Japan’s military indoctrination had on its servicemen. Even Kuribayashi refused to surrender in the end, by some accounts preferring to commit seppuku rather than fall into American hands alive. Those few Japanese soldiers who survived were often ostracized at home because of their failure to defend the homeland with their lives.
Source(s): Encyclopedia Britannica, Max Hasting's Inferno
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