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On June 6th
1944, the Allies succeeded in gaining a tiny foothold on the coast of
Normandy. However, their positions were still very precarious and the
adversary’s reaction, after the initial surprise, was swift. There then
began the battle to consolidate and extend the beachhead. The next ten
days would be decisive. For the British and Americans, it was a case of
landing fresh troops as quickly as possible, and delaying the arrival of
enemy reinforcements for as long as possible. |
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The
21st Panzer Division advancing towards the front. |
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The
Germans had twenty-seven divisions within a 300-kilometre radius of
the landing beaches, including four armoured ones, which they could send
into battle within a matter of days. They therefore outnumbered their
adversaries two to one, meaning that the Allies ran a serious risk of being
unceremoniously pushed back into the sea.
This, however, was reckoning without the combined and devastatingly
effective action of the Allied tactical aviation and the Resistance. On
the roads, fighter bombers found German convoys to be easy prey,
ruthlessly dive-bombing them and leaving in their wake a trail of
burnt-out wrecks and corpses. To escape the carnage, the Germans rapidly
resorted to travelling at night, but this made them vulnerable to raids
by the Resistance, which delayed the arrival of reinforcements still
further.
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The
German convoys were camouflaged in an attempt to protect them from
Allied aircraft |
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During this time, the Allies saw their forces augment rapidly, at the
average rate of 30,000 men, 7,000 vehicles and 30,000 tonnes of supplies
per day. In the lee of the Gooseberry breakwaters, which had been
created in front of all five landing beaches by scuttling old ships,
vessels of every imaginable size engaged in an incredible ballet.
Further out to sea, equipment was unloaded from large cargo ships onto
metal Rhino barges or amphibious lorries known as DUKWs, which plied the
short distance between ship and shore. Other craft, the flat-bottomed
LSTs and LSIs, sailed right up onto the beaches, lowering their ramps to
disgorge tanks, lorries and soldiers. In front of Arromanches and
Saint-Laurent, work started on two artificial harbours ‑ the Mulberries
‑ while at Port-en-Bessin and Sainte-Honorine-des-Pertes,
PLUTO pipelines were being laid to transfer petrol directly from tankers to
the fuel dumps established on the mainland.
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Each day saw the landing of
thousands of Allied troops |
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In
less than ten days, the Allies had won the fight for a foothold. By June
18th, 600,000 men had been landed, together with 100,000
lorries, and because the Germans were far slower in building up their
forces, they managed to link up the different assault zones within a
very short space of time.
The breach between
Sword and
Juno was closed on June 7th. The
following day, contact was established between the British soldiers of
the 50th Division and the GIs who had landed at Omaha and
advanced into the heart of the Bessin region, moving west towards Isigny
and south as far as Caumont-l’Eventé, thirty kilometres inland. On the
other side of Veys Bay, paratroops belonging to the 101st
Airborne Division captured Carentan on June 12th, thereby
removing the dangerous wedge that had been dividing the
Utah and
Omaha
sectors. The Allies now controlled a single, uninterrupted bridgehead
extending a hundred kilometres, from Quinéville in the west to Dives in
the east.
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The Americans took
Carentan on June 12th |
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