D-Day (Operation Overlord)

Full Description

The Allied amphibious invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944, the largest seaborne invasion in history. Over 156,000 troops landed on five beaches — Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword — with Omaha seeing the heaviest casualties. The invasion opened the second front in Western Europe that Stalin had demanded since 1942 and ultimately led to the liberation of France. Within three months of D-Day, Paris had been liberated and the German army in the west was in retreat.

Critical Perspective

D-Day is often treated in Western memory as the decisive turning point of the war, obscuring the fact that the Soviet Union had already been grinding down the Wehrmacht for three years at enormous cost. The real turning point of the war was Stalingrad (1942–43), not Normandy. This is not to diminish the achievement of June 1944, but to note that Western narratives of the war systematically underweight the Eastern Front, where 80% of German military casualties occurred.