D-Day 75th Anniversary: Canadians At Juno Beach Captured the Most Territory That Day

12.  CANADIAN TROOPS AT JUNO BEACH CAPTURED THE MOST TERRITORY.

Canadian soldiers at Juno Beach also suffered terrible casualties, battling heavy seas before landing on a heavily defended strip of shoreline.  Similar to the Americans at Omaha Beach, the first waves of Canadian troops were mowed down en masse by German artillery.   Estimates put the losses then at nearly fifty percent.

The Canadians persisted, however, and pushed on beyond the beachfront and pursuing retreating Germans inland.  In the end, the Canadians at Juno Beach captured more towns and territory than any other battalions in Operation Overlord.

You can read all fifteen D-Day facts in this blog and my June 6-8 Civil War Navy and RoadDog's RoadLog blogs.

D-Day 75th Anniversary: Toughest Fighting on Omaha Beach

12.  THE TOUGHEST FIGHTING WAS ON OMAHA BEACH.

At Omaha Beach, bombing runs had failed to take out heavily fortified German positions.  The first waves of Americans going ashore were cut down in droves by German machine guns as they crossed the mine-riddled beach.

But, U.S. forces persisted in the day-long slog, pushing forward to a fortified seawall and then up steep bluffs to take out the German artillery posts by nightfall.  All told, about 2,400 American troops were killed, wounded or unaccounted for after the fighting on Omaha Beach

D-Day 75th Anniversary: Dress Rehearsal Was a Disaster

5.   A D-DAY DRESS REHEARSAL WAS A FIASCO.

Two months before D-Day, Allied forces conducted a disastrous dress rehearsal of the Normandy invasion  on an evacuated  English beach called Slapton Sands.  Known as "Exercise Tiger,"  749  U.S. troops lost their lives after a fleet of German E-Boats caught wind of the mock invasion and torpedoed American tank landing ships.

Survivors described the "Exercise Tiger" fiasco as more terrifying than the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach.

D-Day 75th Anniversary: The "Phantom Army"

ALLIED FORCES CARRIED OUT A MASSIVE DECEPTION CAMPAIGN IN ADVANCE OF D-DAY.

The idea behind the ruse was to trick the Germans into thinking  that the invasion would occur at Pas-de-Calais, the closest French coastline to England.    The Allies used fake  radio transmissions, double agents and even a "phantom army," commanded by American general George S. Patton, to throw the Germans off what was really going to happen.

Many of the tanks, cannons and vehicles German reconnaissance spotted were actually blow up balloons.

D-Day 75th Anniversary: What Does D-Day Actually Mean?

Seventy-five years ago, Allied forces attacked German defenses along the French coast at Normandy.  This was a major turning point of World War II and world history.

I  will be writing about this in the next three posts in all of my blogs.

From the History site. "D-Day:  Facts on the epic 1944 invasion that changed  the course of WW II" by Dave Roos.

On June 6, 1944,  more than 156,000 American, British and Canadian troops stormed fifty miles of Normandy's heavily defended beaches.

1.  D-DAY MEANING:  THE 'D' IN D-DAY DOESN'T ACTUALLY STAND FOR ANYTHING.

Unlike V-E DAY  (Victory in Europe) and V-J DAY  (Victory Over Japan), the "D" in D-Day isn't short for "departure" or "decision."  As early as World War I, the U.S. military used the term D-Day to designate the launch date of a mission.

One reason was to keep the date questionable for the enemy and another was to be a place-holder until an actual date was chosen.

D-Day Was 70 Years Ago Today

Continuing with the Chicago Tribune article.

As Hank Rossetti prepared to treat the wounded, another Chicagoan, John Kraeger, 89, was flying over the English Channel toward targets in Normandy.  The Rogers Park native was a ball turret gunner on an Army Air Force B-24, providing relief for ground troops on the beaches by destroying German transportation routes.

"We flew across the channel and we bombed a road and a rail junction.  It was like mass confusion.  There (were) planes going everyplace, and we could see the ships down in the channel firing behind the invasion."

Like most of the remaining World War II veterans, Kraeger was one of  the youngest men in his unit.  "Doing that, being there, it's something you will never forget.  I was just an enlisted man, a very small cog in the big machine."

--Old Secesh