Was D‑Day a success

If you subscribe to BBC History Magazine Print or Digital Editions then you can unlock 10 years’ worth of archived history material fully searchable by Topic, Location, Period and Person.

When it came off, it immediately took on this legendary status.

There was a limit to the troops and materiel that could be landed in the first instance, so the key would be to secure a bridgehead and build up a critical mass of troops and supplies before the Germans could mount a concerted counter-attack.The Allied expectation was that, as long as the initial counter-attack was repulsed, the German army would then do what it had in north Africa and Italy: retreat gradually in stages, keeping its forces intact as long as possible and well clear of the coast (the closer they were to the sea, the greater the risk of bombardment by massed naval guns lying offshore).

When he was ordered to drop the ramp, he paused. And as we approached the shoreline where the water hits the sand, and the machine guns were hitting the front of the boat—it was like a typewriter,” DeVita, who was barely 19 on June 6, 1944, remembers. One assumes the meteorologists would have been able to pick that up but if not it could have been the most appalling disaster in military history.So the decision to go on 6 June was definitely the right one.

The Nazi general in charge of the so-called Atlantic Wall, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, had made sure that there was artillery, concrete pillboxes for machine gunners, miles of barbed wire, anti-tank devices and minefields.But most of the Germans’ real firepower was concentrated in the Pas de Calais, where the English Channel is at its narrowest.

I think he was quite right to let the commanders make their own decisions, having established an overall strategy.Yet one has to accept the fact that the armies of democracies could not possibly fight in the same way as those of totalitarian regimes where the degree of indoctrination was simply overwhelming. The battle did not stop there; British and German troops continued to arrive, and that afternoon the roles were reversed – the Germans, carrying out a typical counter-attack, were ambushed, losing six Tiger tanks and a similar number of Panzer Mk IVs. “I figured in my mind when I drop that damn ramp, the bullets that are hitting the ramp are going to come into the boat. This is a diamond 9 card sort to categorise and prioritise the reasons that D Day was successful. There seems to be a problem, please try again. This didn’t make him a nice man but a good ruthless general is not going to be a very nice man and Patton was a pretty demanding commander to put it mildly.One has to acknowledge a huge achievement in keeping such a very disparate alliance together with such conflicting characters. After the battle, Woodson was highly commended, but never received a medal. They were able to inflict considerable casualties on the British and the Americans here by using camouflage and mines and also some very nasty fighting.And this brings me to a point that I believe has been hugely overlooked in the past: the fighting in Normandy was comparable to that on the Eastern Front.

Events might have unfolded differently if details of the Allied plan had leaked out.Presented by General Sir Richard Dannatt, former head of the British ArmyGerman defences along the coast of north-western Europe were formidable. So I froze.” But then the coxswain again yelled at DeVita to lower the ramp, and he followed the order.