Recommended Reading: Overlord - D-Day Landings

D-Day was described by Dwight Eisenhower as, “This great and noble undertaking.”

Last night I came to the end of ‘OVERLORD: The illustrated history of the D-Day landings’ by Ken Ford and Steven J. Zaloga. I closed the book feeling much better informed about June 6, 1944 a historic day and event, i.e., the day the UK, USA and Canada placed their feet and overpowering might upon Europe’s shore and the road toward Germany and victory in WW2.

‘OVERLORD’ is an excellent companion to another book I read recently, i.e., ‘D-Day’ by Antony Beevor, and in it I caught the sense of the authority with which the Allies landed. E.g., “The American (artificial) port off Omaha (Beach) was destroyed in a gale between June 19 and 21, but the British Mulberry (artificial port) at Arromanches, although damaged in the same gale, remained in use for the next ten months, by which time it had landed 2,500,000 men, 500,000 vehicles and 4,000,000 tons of supplies.” (pg. 331)

I also grasped more fully, with the help of distinctive photographs, the type of action my father was a part of (on landing barges loaded with infantry and war supplies of every kind) during D-Day in Sicily, and then Italy, one year earlier.

[Note barrage balloons, to keep low flying

aircraft at bay; ‘OVERLORD’ pg. 289]

Though the scene above from GOLD Beach reveals all business is proceeding smoothly (the Luftwaffe was not a factor on D-Day), other photos reveal the utter destruction of Allied troops and make my father’s words in his Navy memoirs more vivid.

He writes: “We started unloading supplies with our LCMs about a half mile off the beach and then the worst began - German bombers. We were bombed 36 times in the first 72 hours - at dusk, at night, at dawn and all day long, and they said we had complete command of the air... Stukas blew up working parties on the beach once when I was only about 100 feet out. Utter death and destruction.” (pg. 35, “Dad, Well Done”)

‘OVERLORD’ - highly recommended to those wanting to know more about D-Day from Allies point-of-view.

[Photos by G.Harrison]

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