Before this gets into a huge debate about the relative importance of the various allies contributions to the outcome of WW2, I just wanted to pause to remember one of the rather epic battles of WW2 in terms of its scale and influence on the outcome of the war. While you could argue that by this point the outcome of the war was almost very heavily skewed against the Germans (because of what was happening on the Russian and Italian fronts at this point), it probably greatly shortened the duration of the war and I cannot imagine what would go through someone's mind while charging onto a heavily defended beach.

++martian

It was impressive even just from a logistics point of view, let alone the actual invasion part....

Cheers!!!!!

usa #1

Especially considering that the command and logistics planners fluffed it up royally, but the guys on the ground just gritted their collective teeth and powered through the hail of hell.

lest we forget :(

damn straight was impressive.

The whole intelligence operation to deceive the Germans into thinking that an army of 1 million was posied to invade Calais was amazing too.

Crashing a dead body into the sea near Spain with breakable codes about an invasion of Calais. Thousands of blow-up tanks on the South-East coast. Breakable codes claiming that Normandy was a diversion.

This deception convinced Hitler to keep his Panzer divisions waiting outside Calais for three days, allowing the allies enough time to secure a foothold.

That was impressive, especially the effort they went to with the authenticity of the dead body and its cause of death.

Watched a great documentary about 4 years ago on that but cant for the life of me remember the name.


If Rommel was given his way Overlord would of failed so that operation had a massive effect on the war as a whole.

Not to mention that Bletchley Park (http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk) had info that they didn't want to share so that the Nazi didn't know the code was broken

If the German generals on the Eastern Front had their own way Stalingrad may have turned out very differently; the war has so many ifs and buts.

this is true

http://www.britannica.com/...-United-States-Army-Group