Veterans, politicians and dignitaries including King Charles have been marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy today.
D-Day, or Operation Neptune, was the largest amphibious invasion in military history, when more than 150,000 troops landed by sea and air along a 50-mile stretch of the Normandy coast.
What happened on D-Day? In the early hours of 6 June 1944, Allied troops sailed across the Channel from England and stormed the beaches of Normandy at five separate points, codenamed Utah, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Gold, taking the thinly stretched Nazi defences by surprise. A total of 7,000 ships were involved in the operation.
German command considered the "initial attacks" a "diversionary tactic" and chose not to deploy further units, said the BBC. While the Allies suffered at least 10,000 casualties, with more than 4,000 confirmed dead, they established five vital military access points into Europe by the evening.
Why was it so significant? Prior to D-Day, the Allied forces' access to Western Europe had been limited by the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940. By June 1944, an operation was under way to liberate the Italian peninsula, but establishing a foothold in Normandy was essential for a full-scale invasion.
Following their defeat on the beaches, the Nazi forces in Western Europe were so depleted that the Allies were able to advance, capturing Paris by 25 August, and Brussels by 3 September. Within a year of the landings, Adolf Hitler was dead and Germany had surrendered, ending the Western theatre of the war.
What if D-Day had failed? "Without D-Day," said Frank Blazich, curator of military history at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of American History, "the total defeat of Nazi Germany and return of democracy to Western Europe could not be envisioned as inevitable." It was "one of the rare moments in history when the world changed".
Failure would have shown America to be a "paper tiger", author Michel Paradis told the "Lawfare Daily" podcast. In practical terms, the conflict would have "dragged on far longer", with the Allies taking a slower route up from the Mediterranean. That would have taken the Second World War past the point that America developed functioning nuclear weapons. "Would the United States have dropped the bomb in Germany?" asked Paradis. And "what would the historic, political, diplomatic results of that have been?" The "number of counterfactuals" show how important this moment really was for the Allies. |