On June 6, 1944, the vanguard of the Allied forces, mainly British and American troops, totaling 176,000 people, crossed the English Channel from Britain and landed in Normandy, capturing five beaches in Utah, Omaha, Golden Beach, Juno and Sword Beach;
Many people know about the world-famous Normandy landing, which was once called one of the greatest battles and the greatest landing battle of the 20th century. The Normandy landings were a major Allied campaign of World War II, code-named Operation Overlord. Through this operation, the Allies transported nearly three million soldiers across the English Channel, officially opening up the Western Front. The operation was also by far the largest maritime landing in human history. The whole war situation at that time was of great significance to the world.
Nearly three million soldiers crossed the English Channel to Normandy, France. The Battle of Normandy was by far the world's largest maritime landing operation, which fundamentally changed the strategic posture of World War II
So what was the real Normandy landing like? Nearly 3 million Allied troops crossed the English Channel to France during that battle, and fewer than 400,000 Germans fought.
For this massive campaign, the Allies assembled a total of up to 2.88 million troops. The Army has a total of 36 divisions and about 1.53 million people. The Navy has about 5,300 warships in combat. There were 13,700 combat aircraft of the Air Force.
In the case of such a huge disparity in the number of people involved in the war, the number of Allied casualties and missing people still reached more than 300,000, which was more than the number of German casualties and the number of missing and captured combined. And these precious old photographs record the scene of the war that year. Eisenhower once likened it to a "slaughterhouse," where every step was stepped on a decaying corpse and what it was like to have no experience could not imagine. And the horrors of that war were 10 times worse than those films that came later.
The ground propulsion warfare after the landing was the most brutal. After the victory of the beach landing, large Allied troops arrived on the battlefield one after another. After the initial passivity, the German command has also fully returned to the gods. They quickly transferred Kalai's troops to the battlefield, and even a small number of Soviet-German troops began to return to the battlefield. Since the Allies did not take Caen and Cherbourg at the first time of the landing, German reinforcements fought fiercely around these two points. At the Battle of Caen, the German SS 12th Panzer Division launched a desperate counterattack against the Allies on the left and right flanks. The Allies barely repelled the German attack after a bitter battle. The next day, five German panzer divisions assembled and launched a counterattack against the Allied positions.
In just a few days, the Germans and allies alternated the initiative, and the front line positions changed hands several times. Both sides suffered heavy casualties, and the Battle of Caen was far more tragic than the landslides.