What were the normandy landings on D-day and why are they important? They were the turning point of world war 2. The Germans had taken over most of europe and controlled france at the time. The allies had to make a move if they wanted to win the war,so they came up with operation overlord or D-day. The 5 beaches of normandy gave the allies the foot hold they needed to take back europe,even though it was hard and costly.Three of them were much worse than the other two.
Omaha was the most costly of all the Normandy landings. According to Greenspan,”nearly 2,400 U.S. troops were dead or missing”. From the beginning it wasn’t going well because the Army intelligence had underestimated the number of german forces (greenspan). What’s worse is the aerial bombardment didn’t do as much damage as it needed to ,without the extra …show more content…
It was added by general Dwight Eisenhower to ensure the capture of the port of Cherbourg(Trueman). According to Trueman, Cherbourg was the only port big enough to handle all of the supplies that the allies needed. The target landing site was 3 miles wide and lightly defended compared to Omaha(Trueman).The attack was scheduled for 6:30am and the plan was to drop paratroopers 2-5 miles inland at 1:30am to cause chaos, while infantry men came from the beach attacked latter that morning(Trueman). The paratrooper mission went as planned but, the infantry men coming from ships were knocked off course by strong currents and landed about 2 kilometers off(Trueman).Luckily for them, that part of the beach wasn’t as heavily defended as the original landing point.Many of the paratroopers drowned in the marshes because of their heavy equipment and other were shot out of the sky(Greenspan).One even got caught on a church steeple and hung there for two hours before he was captured(Greenspan).Overall out of the 20,000 troops who landed at Utah there were less than 300