D-Day and Normandy, Summer 1944
The largest amphibious invasion ever mounted — five beaches, three airborne divisions, and eleven weeks of battle that destroyed a German army.
In the first minutes of 6 June 1944, C-47s dropped the American and British airborne into the dark fields of Normandy; at dawn, behind the guns of nearly 7,000 vessels, the largest amphibious force in history came ashore on five beaches — Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, Sword. By nightfall some 156,000 Allied soldiers were in France, and the Atlantic Wall — four years in the building — had been broken in a single morning.
What followed was fighting as savage as anything in the West: the hedgerow war of the bocage, Villers-Bocage and the bloody grind around Caen, under an Allied air supremacy so complete that German columns could barely move by day. When Operation Cobra broke the front at the end of July, the campaign ended in encirclement at the Falaise Pocket and the destruction of the German army in Normandy. Paris was liberated on 25 August. Every machine below has its own page in the archive.
