D-Day. June 6th. 1944.

[Bob Hubbard]

150,000+ men stormed Germany's Fortress Europe.
Over 10,000 fell, 4,400+ forever.
To them, thank you.
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On D-Day, the Allies landed around 156,000 troops in Normandy. The American forces landed numbered 73,000: 23,250 on Utah Beach, 34,250 on Omaha Beach, and 15,500 airborne troops. In the British and Canadian sector, 83,115 troops were landed (61,715 of them British): 24,970 on Gold Beach, 21,400 on Juno Beach, 28,845 on Sword Beach, and 7900 airborne troops.

The Allied casualties figures for D-Day have generally been estimated at 10,000, including 2500 dead. Broken down by nationality, the usual D-Day casualty figures are approximately 2700 British, 946 Canadians, and 6603 Americans. However recent painstaking research by the US National D-Day Memorial Foundation has achieved a more accurate - and much higher - figure for the Allied personnel who were killed on D-Day. They have recorded the names of individual Allied personnel killed on 6 June 1944 in Operation Overlord, and so far they have verified 2499 American D-Day fatalities and 1915 from the other Allied nations, a total of 4414 dead (much higher than the traditional figure of 2500 dead). Further research may mean that these numbers will increase slightly in future.

http://www.ddaymuseum.co.uk/faq.htm#casualities

Primo Victoria.
:salute:

 

[Tez3]

When I was staying in Cornwall in April we walked to an estate just up the road from where we were staying, it has a magnificent garden and an interesting history. It also has it's own beach on the Helford river which was used by American troops to set off for the D Day landings. Standing on the beach you can imagine what these young men were feeling as they set off. Along the Cornish coast young men have set off for war many times from fighting off the Vikings, the Arab slave traders, the Spanish Armada, the French though just as many were smugglers, Daphne Du Maurier's Frenchmen's Creek is only a couple of miles from Trebah beach and the house that was used as Manderley is on the opposite bank, I wonder if those brave young Americans read her books as they waited for the orders to embark. I hope at least they enjoyed the peaceful countryside and the hospitality (especially the scrumpy!) before they embarked, it was the least they deserved. I like to think they did before entering the hell of battle.

http://www.trebahgarden.co.uk/beach.html (the pictures are a slide show and include the vessels used in the Landings)

 

[MA-Caver]

In my reading of that day long past I still cannot help wondering if they could've bettered prepared the beaches prior to the landings. That the machine-gun nests and pill boxes could've been hammered harder to ensure more would be able to actually set foot on European soil, rather dying in the landing crafts or tanks which sunk to the bottom too quickly... then the hundreds and thousands more who died only after taking a few steps.
Just a sad waste, a terrible waste.

But waste or not it still in the end long term (helped) free Europe, then the rest of the world and brought us all here to this day to honor those fallen.