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Omaha, Fortitude & Eisenhower's Gamble: The Machinery of D-Day
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Operation Overlord succeeded because of a phantom army, a Spanish spy, and one Supreme Commander willing to bet everything on a break in the storm. This chapter of the Normandy invasion reveals the engineering behind June 6, 1944 — before a single soldier touched the sand.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The end of the war in Western Europe was decided, in large part, before a single soldier set foot on a beach. It was decided in planning rooms in London, in the offices of MI5, and in the mind of one Supreme Commander who had to choose a date, a place, and a window of weather that might not hold.
Start with what the Allies were up against. Hitler's Atlantic Wall was a two-thousand-mile defensive line running from the Arctic Circle down through Norway, Denmark, France, and into Spain.
Operation Fortitude was a deception campaign built on one central idea. Convince German high command that Normandy was a feint, and that the real invasion was coming at Pas-de-Calais, two hundred miles to the northeast.
MI5 had spent the early war years doing something remarkable. They'd identified virtually every German intelligence agent operating in Britain, and they'd turned them.
Before any soldier hit any beach, Dwight Eisenhower had to make a decision that the entire operation depended on. The weather in the English Channel in early June nineteen forty-four was bad.
Hours before the beach landings, thirteen thousand four hundred American paratroopers from the Eighty-Second and the Hundred and First Airborne Divisions boarded C-47 aircraft and flew toward the Cotentin Peninsula. The plan was to drop them behind the German lines, secure critical positions, and cut off German reinforcements before they could reach the beaches.
Five sectors. Five simultaneous landings.
The Atlantic Wall had been breached. Hitler's two-thousand-mile fortification, designed to make the European continent impregnable from the west, had a hole in it.
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