Andreas Koureas
Now, almost eighty years ago, over 23,000 airborne troops landed in Nazi-occupied France with 132,450 Allied forces crossing the channel via sea; 6,833 vessels—including 1,213 warships—took part with over 14,000 sorties flown during the previous evening and D-Day itself; five beach areas were devised, with the First U.S. Army landing on two and the Second British Army landing on the other three. By the end of August, over 2 million men, 3 million tons of supplies and stores, and almost half a million vehicles had landed in Normandy.
But what led up to this moment was multiple years in the making. After the Dunkirk evacuation and the subsequent fall of France, Great Britain and its empire gallantly continued a lonely, year-long struggle as the only major power fighting German Nazism and Italian Fascism—until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Although no clear victory was in sight, and with the Britannic world overstretched—battling over the air of Western Europe, on land in North Africa, and at sea in the Atlantic and Mediterranean—Prime Minister Winston Churchill had always planned for a later liberation of Western Europe.
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