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The Phantom Army & the Storm: How D-Day Was Won Before It Began
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On June 6, 1944, 150,000 Allied troops stormed five Normandy beaches — but the invasion was nearly decided by a phantom army, double agents, and one general's gamble against the weather. This is the first chapter of Operation Overlord: the deception, the decision, and the dawn of the largest seaborne invasion in history.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
By the morning of June sixth, nineteen forty-four, the Germans had been waiting three years for this moment. They knew the invasion was coming.
Hitler's Atlantic Wall was an extraordinary piece of engineering and an extraordinary piece of propaganda. Two thousand miles of concrete bunkers, artillery emplacements, machine gun nests, and coastal defenses stretching from the Arctic Circle down through occupied France and along the coast of Spain.
Operation Fortitude was one of the most audacious deception campaigns ever executed. Its purpose was simple: convince the German high command that the invasion would land at Calais, and keep them convinced even after Allied troops hit the beaches at Normandy.
The British intelligence service MI5 had done something remarkable in the years before D-Day. They had identified every German spy operating in Britain.
The deception could do nothing about the weather. Through the first days of June, a powerful storm system sat over the English Channel.
Thirteen thousand four hundred American paratroopers boarded C-47 aircraft on the night of June fifth. The men of the Eighty-Second and One Hundred and First Airborne Divisions were going in first, before the beach landings, tasked with securing key positions behind the German coastal defenses.
At dawn, five Allied beach sectors came under assault simultaneously. American forces hit Utah and Omaha.
Nine thousand Allied casualties on a single day. Killed, wounded, and missing across all five beaches and the airborne operations.
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