97 Fun Facts About D-Day

D-Day, the Allied landings in Normandy, fell on what date?

June 6, 1944: the landings had been fixed for June 5 and were pushed back a day by a Channel storm; the 'D' simply stands for the unnamed day an operation begins.

D-Day opened which codenamed Allied campaign, the Battle of Normandy, that ended with the Germans retreating across the Seine?

Operation Overlord ran from the seaborne and airborne landings to the German retreat east across the Seine on 30 August 1944.

Roughly how many Allied airborne troops dropped into Normandy before the seaborne assault?

About 24,000 American, British and Canadian airborne troops went in shortly after midnight, several hours before the amphibious landings began at about 06:30.

Who served as the Supreme Allied Commander overseeing the D-Day invasion?

Dwight D. Eisenhower drafted, and never had to release, a note taking sole blame in case the landings failed.

Which German Field Marshal oversaw the Atlantic Wall defenses in Normandy before D-Day?

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was appointed in 1943 to oversee the development of German coastal defenses, known as the 'Atlantic Wall', in anticipation of an Allied invasion.

What was the specific code name for the naval assault phase of the D-Day landings?

Operation Neptune covered the amphibious phase: carrying the assault divisions across the Channel, bombarding the coastal defences, and putting troops and supplies ashore on the five landing beaches.

Commander Philippe Kieffer led commandos from which nation ashore at Sword Beach on D-Day?

They came from France: Kieffer's 177 Free French commandos of No. 4 Commando, attached to a British brigade, stormed the fortified casino at Riva Bella on Sword Beach.

D-Day was pushed back 24 hours from its planned date for what reason?

Unfavorable weather conditions forced the delay: a further postponement would have cost at least two weeks, since the needed combination of moon, tide and time of day came only a few days each month.

Which of the D-Day landing beaches saw the heaviest Allied casualties?

Omaha Beach cost roughly 2,400 American casualties on D-Day, the men landing under heavy fire from gun emplacements on the cliffs above.

The 3rd Canadian Infantry Division stormed which of the five Normandy beaches?

Juno Beach: the 3rd Canadian Division came ashore on the Mike and Nan sectors around Courseulles, Bernières and Saint-Aubin, under the British Second Army.

Which unit scaled a 35-metre Normandy cliff under Lieutenant Colonel James Earl Rudder?

The US Army Rangers of Rudder's 2nd Ranger Battalion climbed the Pointe du Hoc cliff with ropes and ladders; the battery's guns had been moved inland, where a Ranger patrol found and disabled them.

Fortitude South, the main deception under Plan Bodyguard, faked a threat to which stretch of coast?

Fortitude South pointed at the Pas-de-Calais, the shortest Channel crossing, using a fictitious First US Army Group in Kent; German reserves were held there for weeks after 6 June.

What were the Mulberries, built in Britain and towed across the Channel in summer 1944?

The Mulberries were temporary portable harbours, one American off Omaha and one British off Arromanches; the British harbour handled supplies for months after a June storm wrecked the American one.

Which British general commanded all Allied ground forces in the Normandy campaign until 1 September 1944?

Bernard Montgomery commanded 21st Army Group and all Allied ground forces in Normandy until Eisenhower took over direct ground command on 1 September 1944.

The Normandy landings hold what record in military history?

The Normandy landings were the largest seaborne invasion in history: about 156,000 Allied troops landed by sea and air on 6 June 1944 across a 50-mile front of five beaches.

Which major Normandy city, an Allied objective for D-Day itself, held out until mid-July 1944?

Caen, about 15 kilometres from Sword Beach, was a D-Day objective but fell only in July, its northern half in Operation Charnwood and the rest during Goodwood.

How many Allied troops were confirmed dead on D-Day, out of at least 10,000 casualties?

4,414 Allied dead have been confirmed by name, 2,501 of them American; German casualties on the day have been estimated at 4,000 to 9,000 men.

What were the mine-clearing, demolition and bridging tanks of Normandy nicknamed?

Hobart's Funnies were modified Shermans and Churchills, flail, flamethrower, bridging and AVRE variants, developed under Major-General Percy Hobart of the 79th Armoured Division.

Which RAF group captain's 4 June forecast let the Supreme Allied Commander launch the invasion on 6 June?

Group Captain James Stagg, SHAEF's chief meteorologist, forecast a brief improvement for 6 June; the next dates with the right tides were two weeks away and without a full moon.

How many aircraft could the Luftwaffe muster over Normandy against the Allies' 9,543?

Only 815 aircraft were available to Luftflotte 3 in France; Allied bombing and the fighter battles over Germany had crippled the Luftwaffe and secured air supremacy before the landings.

Which British admiral, flag officer at Dover during Dunkirk, commanded the D-Day naval operations?

Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, who had run the Dunkirk evacuation from Dover, was Allied Naval Commander for Neptune; historian Correlli Barnett called his plan a 'never surpassed masterpiece of planning'.

Which Norwegian destroyer was sunk by German torpedo boats off Sword Beach at 05:10 on D-Day?

HNoMS Svenner, hit amidships by a torpedo from Le Havre-based German torpedo boats, broke in two and sank; the same salvo missed the battleships Warspite and Ramillies.

Which town, taken by American paratroopers within two hours of landing, was the first liberated on D-Day?

Sainte-Mère-Église, on the main road behind Utah Beach, was taken by the 82nd Airborne's 505th Parachute Infantry before dawn on 6 June, the first town freed by American troops in Normandy.

Private Bill Millin famously did what as Lord Lovat's commandos came ashore at Sword?

He was Lovat's personal piper and arrived with the 1st Special Service Brigade in the second wave.

On the night before the invasion, the SAS dropped dummy paratroopers over Isigny and which port?

Operation Titanic dropped dummy parachutists near Le Havre and Isigny to draw off German reserves; the same night No. 617 Squadron dropped 'window' foil strips to fake a naval convoy on German radar.

The 4th Infantry Division landed 21,000 troops on Utah Beach at the cost of how many casualties?

Only 197 casualties: strong currents had pushed the landing craft about 2,000 yards south of the intended zone, onto a lightly defended stretch of Utah Beach.

Which brigadier general at Utah Beach decided to 'start the war from right here' after the landings drifted?

Theodore Roosevelt Jr., eldest son of President Theodore Roosevelt and assistant commander of the 4th Infantry Division, ordered later waves re-routed to the new spot; he received the Medal of Honor.

Which German formation, unexpectedly in position, opposed the American landings at Omaha?

The 352nd Infantry Division, a well-trained unit Allied intelligence had not placed on the coast, held the Omaha bluffs; American forces suffered about 2,400 casualties there but landed 34,000 troops by day's end.

Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis won the only D-Day Victoria Cross for actions on which beach?

Gold Beach: Hollis of the 6th Green Howards attacked two pillboxes at the Mont Fleury battery and later rescued trapped men at Crépon, the only Victoria Cross won on D-Day.

Which British formation was the assault force at Gold Beach?

The 50th (Northumbrian) Division, under Bucknall's XXX Corps and supported by the 8th Armoured Brigade, was the Gold assault force; its objectives included Arromanches and the high ground inland.

What was the code name of the cancelled sixth D-Day beach east of Sword?

Band, a sixth beach planned east of Sword beyond the Orne estuary, was dropped from the plan, leaving Sword as the Allied eastern flank on 6 June 1944.

Which formation mounted the only German armoured counter-attack on D-Day, halting the advance on Caen?

The 21st Panzer Division, the only armoured division near the coast, attacked between Sword and Juno in the afternoon and reached the sea at Lion-sur-Mer before pulling back.

Which Canadian objective on D-Day was an airport west of Caen?

Carpiquet airfield, west of Caen, was the 3rd Canadian Division's final D-Day objective and was not taken until July; the division was also to cut the Caen–Bayeux road.

Seized by glider-borne troops in the opening hours of D-Day, the Bénouville bridge over the Caen Canal was later renamed what?

D Company of the Ox and Bucks landed in six Horsa gliders and took the bridge within 10 minutes; in 1944 it was renamed Pegasus Bridge after the airborne forces' winged-horse emblem.

Which major led the 181-man glider force that seized the Caen Canal and Orne bridges on D-Day?

Major John Howard of the 2nd Ox and Bucks led Operation Deadstick; the first glider came down 47 yards from the canal bridge at 00:16, and both bridges were taken within minutes.

The 155 mm guns at Pointe du Hoc were originally captured French pieces from which conflict?

They were French 155 mm GPF guns of First World War design, captured in 1940; by D-Day the Germans had moved them inland as they rebuilt the site with casemates.

The Mulberry harbour at Omaha Beach was wrecked by a violent storm that struck on which date?

The storm that began on 19 June 1944 blew for three days; the American harbour off Omaha was so badly damaged it was abandoned and supplies were landed over the open beaches.

In the Mulberry harbours, what were the concrete caissons called?

The concrete caissons were Phoenixes, cast in Britain in several sizes, towed across the Channel and flooded to settle on the seabed as the harbour's breakwater.

The Higgins boat landing craft used on D-Day was typically built from what material?

Higgins built the LCVP mainly of plywood, with a steel bow ramp; it could ferry 36 men to shore at 12 knots, and Eisenhower called Andrew Higgins 'the man who won the war for us'.

In which US city were Higgins boats built?

Higgins Industries built them in New Orleans, Louisiana, where Andrew Higgins had moved from the lumber business into boatbuilding; the city now houses the National WWII Museum.

Who replaced Omar Bradley as commander of the phantom First US Army Group in Operation Fortitude?

George Patton, whom the Germans rated highly, took over the fictitious First US Army Group and toured its fake units with a photographer to make sure he was seen.

Fortitude North, staged out of Scotland, threatened an Allied invasion of which occupied country?

Norway was the target: Fortitude North invented a British Fourth Army headquartered in Edinburgh, with fake radio traffic, to keep German divisions tied down in Scandinavia.

Adolf Hitler ordered construction of the Atlantic Wall in 1942 through which numbered order?

Führer Directive No. 40 of 23 March 1942 ordered the coastal defence; the Atlantic Wall fortifications ran along the coast of continental Europe and Scandinavia between 1942 and 1944.

Which colour named the Resistance's 15-day D-Day operation to sabotage the railways?

Plan Vert (green) targeted the railways: 52 locomotives were wrecked on 6 June alone, while Bleu hit electrical facilities, Tortue delayed road reinforcements and Violet cut telephone cables.

How were Resistance groups told to launch their D-Day sabotage tasks?

The BBC French service read out coded 'personal messages'; hundreds of scraps of poetry and random sentences went out nightly, so the handful that mattered, like Verlaine's 'Chanson d'automne', hid in the noise.

How many Panzer divisions did Hitler hold back as his personal strategic reserve in France?

Rommel wanted the tanks right on the coast; Geyr wanted them held back near Paris and Rouen. Hitler split the difference and kept the rest for himself.

Which three US battleships bombarded the beaches as part of the Western Task Force on D-Day?

USS Nevada, raised after Pearl Harbor, fired on Utah while Texas and Arkansas covered Omaha; the American beaches got only about 40 minutes of naval fire before the first troops landed at 06:30.

Why was the pre-dawn coastal bombing largely ineffective at Omaha Beach?

More than 2,200 British, Canadian and US bombers attacked from around midnight, but many crews feared hitting their own troops.

Omaha's landing sectors ran from Charlie in the west to which sector in the east?

Fox Red, under the cliffs at the eastern end, was the last sector; the worst slaughter was at the other end, where A Company of the 116th was cut to pieces at Dog Green within 15 minutes.

Who probably named Omaha and Utah after the hometowns of two privates fitting out his HQ?

Omar Bradley probably chose the names: the privates fitting out his First Army headquarters came from Omaha, Nebraska and Provo, Utah. The corps commanders, Gerow and Collins, were from Virginia and Louisiana.

Exercise Tiger, the April 1944 rehearsal that turned deadly, was held at which beach?

Slapton Sands in Devon was chosen for its likeness to Utah: gravel, a strip of land, then a lake (Slapton Ley). About 3,000 locals were evacuated, some of whom had never left their villages.

At least how many US servicemen died when E-boats attacked the Exercise Tiger convoy?

At least 749 American servicemen died, 551 Army and 198 Navy. Many drowned because lifebelts worn around the waist flipped them under heavy packs; SHAEF released the figures only in August 1944.

Which British newspaper's May 1944 crosswords alarmed MI5 by using D-Day code words?

The Daily Telegraph crossword, set by headmaster Leonard Dawe, used Utah, Omaha, Overlord, Mulberry and Neptune within a month; he had let schoolboys fill in blank grids near a camp full of chattering soldiers.

Who played paratrooper John Steele, snagged on a church steeple, in The Longest Day?

Red Buttons played Steele, who hung limply for two hours pretending to be dead before being captured, then escaped; an effigy in Airborne uniform was later hung from the real steeple.

Robert Capa's surviving Omaha Beach photographs from D-Day are known collectively as what?

The Magnificent Eleven: Capa said he shot 106 frames and that a London darkroom assistant ruined the rest, though later research suggests he may only ever have taken those eleven.

How many American dead lie in the Normandy American Cemetery above Omaha Beach?

9,389 Americans are buried on the 172.5-acre site, including four women and aircrew shot down as early as 1942; it draws about a million visitors a year, the most of any ABMC cemetery.

In the Mulberry harbours, what code name was given to the floating piers or roadways?

The roadways were Whales, floating steel spans carried on Beetle pontoons; Bombardons formed the floating outer breakwater and Spuds were the pier heads. Each finished harbour was about the size of Dover's.

Which old French battleship was sunk as a Gooseberry breakwater blockship off Sword Beach?

Courbet, a 1911 dreadnought, was scuttled in Gooseberry 5 off Sword along with the Dutch cruiser Sumatra; the old British battleship Centurion went down as a blockship off Omaha.

In Operation Gambit, what marked the ends of the Anglo-Canadian beaches for the fleet?

Two midget submarines, X20 and X23, sat on the seabed from 4 June, then surfaced at 04:30 on D-Day to raise 18-foot masts with lights. The Americans declined the same service for their beaches.

The amphibious swimming Sherman tanks of D-Day were nicknamed after which cartoon character?

'Donald Duck' came from the DD initials of Duplex Drive: a canvas flotation screen let the 30-ton Sherman float and twin propellers drove it through the water at about four knots.

Which engineer devised the canvas flotation screen that let DD tanks float?

Nicholas Straussler's first test, in June 1941, floated a light tank in the Brent Reservoir in north London, watched by General Sir Alan Brooke.

Launched 5,000 yards off Omaha, how many of the 741st Tank Battalion's 32 DD tanks sank?

27 of the 32 sank in the rough sea and 33 crewmen were lost; only two swam ashore. Seeing this, the 743rd's tanks were carried all the way to the beach in their landing craft.

The Rangers' 100-foot extension ladders for Pointe du Hoc were requisitioned from where?

The 100-foot ladders came from the London Fire Brigade and were mounted on four DUKW amphibious trucks; German fire sank one. The landing craft also fired rocket-propelled grapnels trailing ropes up the cliff.

Which two Rangers found Pointe du Hoc's missing 155 mm guns hidden in an orchard?

Leonard Lomell and Jack Kuhn of D Company found the guns in an orchard; Lomell called it 'pure luck'. The guns were aimed toward Utah Beach, and the pair wrecked them with thermite grenades.

Richard Winters of Band of Brothers fame led a 13-man assault at Brécourt Manor that is taught as a textbook attack where?

West Point teaches it as a textbook assault on a fixed position by a numerically inferior force; the battery was shelling causeway exit 2 off Utah Beach, and Winters received the Distinguished Service Cross.

Saving Private Ryan's Omaha Beach sequence was shot at Curracloe Beach in which country?

Curracloe in County Wexford, Ireland, offered golden sand and dunes after the real beach proved too built up; about 1,000 Irish Army reservists played the troops over three to four weeks.

Alongside the Sullivans, which brothers' wartime losses inspired Saving Private Ryan?

The Nilands' story, with the Sullivans', shaped Robert Rodat's script after his wife gave him Stephen Ambrose's book D-Day June 6, 1944; Ambrose became the film's historical consultant.

The 1962 epic The Longest Day was adapted from a 1959 book by which author?

Ryan also wrote the screenplay. Darryl F. Zanuck used three credited directors, and the film became the highest-grossing black-and-white movie of its time.

Which Longest Day actor had himself fought at Pegasus Bridge on D-Day as a paratrooper?

Richard Todd, a 7th Parachute Battalion officer, reached Pegasus Bridge on D-Day to reinforce the glider troops; offered the chance to play himself, he took the role of the glider commander instead.

Who jumped in first to shame reluctant extras in The Longest Day's beach scene?

Mitchum was playing Brigadier General Norman Cota, who in reality led the breakout off Dog White with a Bangalore torpedo and wire cutters.

The 56-year-old general who led the first wave at Utah Beach drove a Jeep named what?

'Rough Rider' honoured his father Theodore Roosevelt's Spanish-American War regiment. Roosevelt Jr. died of a heart attack in France on 12 July 1944 and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

Which reporter stowed away in a hospital ship's bathroom to reach the Normandy beaches?

Martha Gellhorn, refused accreditation like every female reporter, hid in a lavatory and went ashore with stretcher-bearers; her husband Ernest Hemingway, officially accredited, never left his landing craft.

The code words 'Ham' and 'Jam' radioed early on D-Day signalled the capture of what?

Both bridges fell within minutes of the 00:16 glider landing. Engineers found they had been wired for demolition but the explosives were never attached.

Roughly how many of the 600 men sent to destroy the Merville battery reached the rendezvous?

Only about 160 men, a quarter of the force, reached Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway, who attacked anyway and silenced the battery before dawn at a cost of around 75 casualties; its guns proved smaller than feared.

A popular story says the British and Canadian beach code names were shortened from what?

Fish: Goldfish, Swordfish and Jellyfish, with Churchill supposedly vetoing 'Jelly' as unfit for a beach where men might die, so the Canadian beach became Juno.

Which Allied division had pushed farthest inland by the end of D-Day?

The 3rd Canadian Infantry Division got farther than any other Allied division on 6 June, its leading tanks running low on ammunition within sight of Carpiquet airfield, though still short of the Caen–Bayeux road.

The Juno Beach Centre at Courseulles-sur-Mer is built in the shape of a stylised what?

The building's five-pointed plan is a stylised maple leaf. Veteran Garth Webb drove the grassroots campaign, and more than a thousand Canadian veterans attended the opening on 6 June 2003.

Kieffer's French commandos cleared a casino strongpoint at Riva Bella in which town?

Ouistreham: the Riva Bella casino had been turned into a strongpoint; the commandos took it with help from a DD tank, while a concrete observation tower nearby held out for several more days.

Which Sword Beach strongpoint, HQ of the German 736th Regiment, held out until 20:15?

Hillman, near Colleville, was the 736th Regiment's headquarters and had come through the morning bombardment almost untouched; the delay helped stall the King's Shropshire Light Infantry's foot march on Caen.

The 101st and 82nd Airborne's D-Day parachute drops were code-named for which two cities?

All the other pairs were glider missions. Albany carried 6,928 Screaming Eagles in 432 C-47s, jumping from 00:48; Boston followed at 01:51.

The pre-dawn glider missions Chicago and Detroit each flew 52 gliders of which type?

Both missions used the American Waco CG-4 and landed anti-tank guns about 04:00. Chicago was a near-total success, with 92 per cent down within two miles of target; Detroit hit the same cloud bank as the paratroops.

Hamilcar gliders flew which light tank into Normandy for the British 6th Airborne?

The Tetrarch barely fitted inside a Hamilcar, and crews started the engines in the air just before cast-off; about thirty other Hamilcars carried 17-pounder anti-tank guns.

Double agent Garbo, vital to Fortitude, got an MBE from Britain and which German award?

The Iron Cross Second Class was awarded to Garbo by radio on 29 July 1944. Juan Pujol García had fed the Germans a fake order of battle of 75 divisions in Britain when only about 50 existed.

Which 1967 film grew from a novel inspired by a 101st Airborne demolition section in Normandy?

The Dirty Dozen grew from E. M. Nathanson's 1965 novel, loosely inspired by the 'Filthy Thirteen'; ordered to secure bridges over the Douve, half the real unit were killed, wounded or captured on the jump.

Which Hampshire manor served as the Allied commanders' forward headquarters for D-Day?

Southwick House, five miles north of Portsmouth, was SHAEF's forward command post in June 1944 and home to the navy's HMS Dryad navigation school; its great wall map of the invasion was preserved.

The largest Commonwealth WWII cemetery in France, with 4,648 burials, is in which town?

Bayeux War Cemetery holds 4,648 Commonwealth burials; facing it, the Bayeux Memorial names more than 1,800 Commonwealth dead with no known grave. The ground was granted to Britain in perpetuity.

The 'Rupert' dummy paratroopers dropped in Operation Titanic were made mainly of what?

The Ruperts were burlap stuffed with straw and sand: officially 'Device Camouflage No. 15', they stood about 85 cm tall and carried charges that exploded on landing. Americans called them Oscar.

What did Operation Pluto pump under the English Channel to supply the armies after D-Day?

Pluto carried petrol and oil: planners reckoned fuel would be over 60 per cent of supply weight. The pipe was wound on floating drums called Conundrums, and pumping stations were disguised as seaside villas.

On D-Day eve, No. 218 Squadron's Operation Glimmer faked a convoy near which French port?

Glimmer's phantom convoy was aimed at Boulogne. Its twin, Operation Taxable by 617 Squadron, dropped foil 'window' in patterns off the Seine estuary while small boats towed barrage balloons to fatten the radar echo.

Which engineering group designed and built the Atlantic Wall's major gun emplacements?

Organisation Todt, which had built the prewar Siegfried Line, drafted more than half a million French workers, yet Rommel found some stretches of the Wall only 18 per cent complete before D-Day.

Drawn from eight navies, the D-Day invasion fleet of warships, landing craft and merchant vessels numbered how many ships?

The 6,939 vessels included 1,213 warships and 4,126 landing craft, with Britain supplying 892 warships and 3,261 landing craft; the Germans had three torpedo boats and 29 fast attack craft.

Why had the Army Group B commander left Normandy for Germany just before D-Day?

Rommel had gone home for his wife Lucie's 50th birthday on 6 June and also meant to lobby Hitler for more panzer divisions; with a fortnight of storms forecast, many officers were away and men were on leave.

Many German commanders were away on 6 June attending war games in which city?

The war games were at Rennes in Brittany. Allied control of the Atlantic starved German forecasters of weather data, so the Luftwaffe centre in Paris predicted a fortnight of storms and leave was granted.

Which field marshal was OB West, Germany's supreme commander in the West, on D-Day?

Gerd von Rundstedt, OB West since 1942, backed Geyr von Schweppenburg's plan to hold the panzers centrally near Paris while Rommel wanted them on the coast; Hitler replaced him with Kluge in early July 1944.

Which Virginia town, home of Company A, 116th Infantry, hosts the National D-Day Memorial?

Nineteen of its 34 'Bedford Boys' died on D-Day, proportionately the heaviest loss of any American town. The memorial opened on 6 June 2001.

Which cartoonist gave $1 million to the National D-Day Memorial and led its fundraising?

Charles Schulz, the Peanuts creator, and his wife took on the campaign in 1997. Steven Spielberg also helped fund the memorial, which cost about $25 million over seven years.

The 83-metre Overlord Embroidery of the D-Day story deliberately echoes what older work?

Commissioned by Lord Dulverton in 1968 and stitched by the Royal School of Needlework, its 34 panels run more than 10 metres longer than the Bayeux Tapestry, the Norman original it answers.