June 5, 1944: Allies prepare for D-Day
65 years ago, on this day in 1944, more than 1,000 British bombers drop 5,000tons of bombs on German gun batteries placed at the Normandy assault area, while 3,000 Allied ships cross the English Channel in preparation for the invasion of Normandy-D-Day.
Allied troops passing the time on deck enroute to the invasion beaches. The white patches on their torsoes are life vests.
The day of the invasion of occupied France had been postponed repeatedly since May, mostly because of bad weather and the enormous tactical obstacles involved.
Operation NEPTUNE was the cross-Channel crossing phase of Operation OVERLORD. Operation NEPTUNE placed all naval issues under the command of Admiral Bertram Ramsey whose command skill had already been seen in 1940 with the part he played in the evacuation of troops from Dunkirk. Ramsey, back row, second from left in this photo of Supreme Allied commander Eisenhower and his staff.
Finally, despite less than ideal weather conditions-or perhaps because of them-General Eisenhower decided on June 5 to set the next day as D-Day, the launch of the largest amphibious operation in history. Ike knew that the Germans would be expecting postponements beyond the sixth, precisely because weather conditions were still poor.
Exeter Airfield: England, June 5, 1944. This photo is a photo of Col. Robert L. Wolverton, CO, 3rd Bn, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne and his Headquarters stick. They are gathered ready to load on C-47, tail # 292717 in preparation for OPERATION NEPTUNE, the first phase of the Normandy invasion, launched in the last hours of June 5, 1944. The aircraft is the command ship of the 440th Troop Carrier Group, pilot, Col. Frank X. Krebs, CO of the 440th. It is Krebs' job to lead a 45 ship formation of C-47's that will drop units of the 101st Airborne on Drop Zone D in Normandy, France. The aircraft, # 292717 is Kreb's personal plane in which he led the group into battle on all operations he flew except MARKET-GARDEN, the invasion of Holland.
Among those Germans confident that an Allied invasion could not be pulled off on the sixth was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who was still debating tactics with Field Marshal Karl Rundstedt. Runstedt was convinced that the Allies would come in at the narrowest point of the Channel, between Calais and Dieppe; Rommel, following Hitler's intuition, believed it would be Normandy.
101st Airborne paratrooper saddles-up for the big drop. Armed to the teeth, these guys were scattered all over place inland from the invasion beaches on this night in the hours before the June 6 amphibious landings. Their mission was to generally raise hell and delay/impede the German response to the amphibious invasion. They succeeded.
Rommel's greatest fear was that German air inferiority would prevent an adequate defense on the ground; it was his plan to meet the Allies on the coast-before the Allies had a chance to come ashore. Rommel began constructing underwater obstacles and minefields, and set off for Germany to demand from Hitler personally more panzer divisions in the area.
Bad weather and an order to conserve fuel grounded much of the German air force on June 5; consequently, its reconnaissance flights were spotty. That night, more than 1,000 British bombers unleashed a massive assault on German gun batteries on the coast.
Snapshot from a British aircraft depicting a tiny slice of the massive invasion fleet.
At the same time, an Allied armada headed for the Normandy beaches in Operation NEPTUNE, an attempt to capture the port at Cherbourg. But that was not all. In order to deceive the Germans, phony operations were run; dummy parachutists and radar-jamming devices were dropped into strategically key areas so as to make German radar screens believe there was an Allied convoy already on the move.
One dummy parachute drop succeeded in drawing an entire German infantry regiment away from its position just six miles from the actual Normandy landing beaches. All this effort was to scatter the German defenses and make way for Operation OVERLORD, the Allied invasion of Normandy.
Originally Posted by Johnny*Mack*
