Five years ago, I went to Normandy, France to see the site of the June 6, 1944 D-Day allied invasion. Tom Graham, of East Aurora, salutes the Greatest Generation. The invasion of Normandy marked the beginning of the end of Nazi control of Europe in World War II.
One hundred and fifty six thousand American, British and Canadian forces landed on five beaches along a 50-mile stretch of the German heavily fortified coast of France’s Normandy region. The invasion, called Operation Overlord, was one of the largest amphibious military assaults in history and required extensive planning. The Atlantic Wall was an extensive system of coastal defense’s and fortifications built by Nazi Germany between 1942 and 1944 along the coast of continental Europe as a defense against an anticipated Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe from the United Kingdom.
The “Wall” was actually a series of concrete bunkers, manmade barriers and natural obstacles like cliffs and rocks, stretching along 3,000 miles from northern Norway to the Spanish border. These coastal defenses turned the Nazi-occupied Europe into a virtually impregnable fortress that could be held by relatively few troops. I went inside several of the remaining bunkers above Omaha Beach, strategically located to repel the Allied invasion.
The total number of casualties that occurred, from June 6th to August 30 (when German forces retreated across the Seine), was over 425,000 Allied and German troops. This figure includes over 209,.