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D-Day minute by terrifying minute: Joltingly vivid account retells how Operation Overlord unfolded as 150,000 Allied troops gambled everything to defeat the Nazis and change the course of history
Tomorrow marks the 80th anniversary of D-Day at Normandy, the largest seaborne invasion in history, which begun of the liberation of France and western Europe from the Nazis.
Operation Overlord, the code name given to the invasion, saw more than 150,000 troops from the Allied forces land on five beaches in Normandy.
Candles will be lit on graves across Normandy this evening to remember the fallen, while world leaders, including the King and US President Joe Biden will be attending events on Thursday in commemoration.
The following is an adaption for MailOnline from D-Day Minute by Minute by Jonathan Mayo, who relives the landings minute by minute with never before revealed detail.
Monday June 5, 1944
7.30am: At this moment precisely, naval officers are breaking open their sealed orders and discovering the best-kept military secret in history. Tomorrow, they’ll be sailing for Normandy. The Allied invasion will centre on five beaches, each of which has been given a code name. The British and Canadians have opted for Gold, Juno and Sword — from a list supplied by the British Army. The Americans will land on Utah and Omaha — names chosen by their generals.
9.00: Already, the biggest invasion force the world has ever seen is mobilising off the South Coast. In all, D-Day will involve more than 6,203 vessels — 1,213 warships, 4,126 landing craft and 864 merchant vessels.
1.00pm: At the Berghof, Adolf Hitler’s headquarters in the Bavarian Alps, his personal doctor Dr Theodor Morell is arriving for his daily appointment. The 54-year-old Fuhrer is a hypochondriac — and willingly takes the 28 different pills and injections Morell gives him every day. At Downing Street, as usual, Winston Churchill is having a large lunch with plenty of wine.
Boats full of United States troops waiting to leave Weymouth, Southern England, to take part in Operation Overlord in Normandy, June 1944. This location was used as a launching place for Allied troops participating in the invasion
Operation Overlord Normandy troops are boarding a Landing Craft Infantry in Southern England on 5th June 1944
DUKWs, amphibious trucks useful for beach landings, are loaded onto an LST (Landing Ship - Tank) during preparations for the D-Day invasion, June 1944
1.55: Out in the Channel, on board the British troop ship Princess Ingrid, almost every soldier is on the upper deck, waiting for a church service to begin. Suddenly, a gust of wind catches the cloth covering a makeshift altar, and a small silver cross falls on to the deck and breaks in two. The padre and the troops are distraught at this terrible omen. Ronald Seaborne, a naval telegraphist, reflects that he now knows the exact meaning of the phrase ‘fear of God’.
2.10: The man in charge of the German army in France, 69-year-old Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, is leaving his office to have lunch with his son Hans at his favourite Parisian restaurant, the Coq Hardi. He’s just read an intelligence report confirming there’s no likelihood of imminent invasion.
In any case, the Germans are expecting Allied troops to head for the Pas de Calais — where the main Panzer [tank] regiments will be ready to attack them. To help cement this belief, the Allies have been playing tricks. Fake aircraft, landing craft made of wood and canvas, and inflatable tanks have been positioned in fields and rivers on the Suffolk and Norfolk coast. There’s also fake radio traffic — and a fake oil storage depot near Dover, built by technicians from Shepperton Film Studios.
6.00: The sound of bagpipes is echoing across the waters of the Solent. Standing in the bows of the first in a line of 22 ships, piper Bill Millin, dressed in kilt and full battledress, is playing stirring martial music that’s being relayed over a loudspeaker. Rupert Curtis, flotilla officer for landing craft 519, later recalled: ‘The skirl of the pipes worked some strange magic, for it set the troops in the waiting transports cheering from ship to ship.’
American troops in a landing craft approaching Utah beach on D-Day
This photograph from the National Archives taken on June 6, 1944, shows US Army troops wading ashore at Omaha Beach in north-western France, during the D-Day invasion
Picture taken on June 6, 1944 in Normandy showing the Allied forces soldiers involved in the landing operation aimed at fighting the German Wehrmacht as part of the Second World War
7.00: At the Berghof, Hitler, his girlfriend Eva Braun, and propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels are watching the latest newsreel with reports of the war. They are waited on by SS bodyguards dressed in white waistcoats and black trousers.
7.20: Thousands of paratroopers from the Allied airborne forces are being helped into their planes. They are carrying so much equipment that they can barely walk. Their dog tags have been taped together to prevent them making a noise. Faces are black with soot or boot polish. Some have shaved their heads to look like Mohicans — they want to look as intimidating as possible.
8.45: On board the troop ship Empire Battleaxe, the decks are crowded with hundreds of men. The soldiers of the 1st Suffolk Regiment have already gambled away their English money — so they’re starting on the French currency they’ve just been issued.
9.30: Now, 2,700 ships have converged on an area south of the Isle of Wight — quickly nicknamed Piccadilly Circus. Soon they’ll make a 90-degree turn and head for France down channels marked with buoys and swept clear of mines. None of the ships are receiving messages from the outside world. However, in case the Germans should become suspicious at a reduction in wire traffic, meaningless messages are being sent from ship to ship.
9.50: Churchill is in the underground Map Room in Great George Street, not far from No 10. Clementine comes in to wish her husband good night. ‘Do you realise,’ he tells her, ‘that by the time you wake up in the morning 20,000 men may have been killed?’
10.15: In a studio at the BBC’s Bush House, an announcer is reading some lines of a 19th-century poem by Paul Verlaine. It’s a coded message to the French Resistance that the invasion will begin within 48 hours. At the headquarters of the German 15th Army, close to the Belgian border, intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel Hellmuth Meyer knows exactly what it means, because a member of the French Resistance is on his payroll. Rushing into an office where two generals are playing bridge with other officers, Meyer gives them the news. But they aren’t impressed. ‘What sort of general would announce a forthcoming invasion on the radio? You can forget it,’ says General Blumentritt.
Photograph taken on June 6, 1944, shows soldiers unloading equipment on Omaha Beach, Normandy, north-western France after the initial D-Day invasion
Allied Forces landing on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944
6th June 1944: In the distance American Infantrymen are wading towards the beach on the Northern Coast of France during the D-Day Landings
10.30: On a troop ship heading for Juno Beach, 24-year-old Lieutenant James Doohan from Canada has won £3,600 playing craps. The money is tucked safely away in his uniform. On anotherboat heading for Juno, Sergeant Kenneth Lakeman of the Royal Corps of Signals watches one of his men, clearly on edge, prising open a packing case with an unfamiliar serial number. The man goes pale: the box is full of white crosses. ‘God, I don’t mind going to my death, but to take my own cross . . .’ he says, deeply upset.
10.35: One of the leaders of the elite U.S. Rangers is drunk. On a former ferry heading for Omaha beach, Major Cleveland Lytle is saying at the top of his voice to his fellow officers that their mission is suicidal. (It’s certainly dangerous: 200 Rangers will have to climb 100ft cliffs to capture German gun emplacements at the top.) Medical officer Captain Walter Block tries to intervene, but Lytle punches him. Other officers then help restrain the drunken major, and he’s taken to his cabin.
11.25: Three Halifax bombers, each towing a glider, are approaching the French coast. Inside the plywood and canvas Horsa gliders are men from the British 6th Airborne Division, led by 31-year-old Major John Howard. None of them have been in combat before. Everyone’s singing and smoking Players cigarettes. As the first of 156,000 men who will take part in D-Day, they have a particularly daring mission: to capture two bridges from a German garrison — and hold them.
11.30: Pierre Vienot, the ambassador for the French government in exile in London, is face to face with a furious Winston Churchill. As the Prime Minister has just learned, General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French, is refusing to broadcast a D-Day message on the BBC. The reason? He’s seen the text of General Eisenhower’s speech — due to be broadcast at 10am tomorrow — and resents the fact that it makes no mention of himself or the Free French. Churchill doesn’t mince his words. He tells the ambassador that de Gaulle is guilty of ‘treason at the height of battle’ and that the sacrifice of the Allied soldiers is: ‘Blood that has no value for you!’
Rangers firing from a bunker between Pointe du Hoc and Omaha Beach
Picture taken on June 6, 1944 in Normandy showing the Allied forces soldiers involved in the landing operation aimed at fighting the German Wehrmacht as part of the Second World War
Tuesday June 6, 1944
12.07am: As the Halifax bombers release the tow-ropes to the gliders, the British paratroopers stop singing. The only sound is of air rushing over plywood wings. Each man knows that landing will be extremely dangerous — that’s why the Horsa gliders have been nicknamed ‘Hearses’.
12.16: Jim Wallwork can see a metal bridge rushing towards him. Then his glider thumps into French soil and barbed wire at 90 miles an hour. Both he and his navigator are flung through the cockpit window still in their seats.
12.17: The second glider has crash-landed and broken in half. Part of it has ended up on a German trench, and the soldiers in it already have their hands up. The pilot, Oliver Boland, is encouraging the stunned passengers behind him to get out and fight. ‘We’re here. P*** off and do what you’re paid to do.’ Twenty-two of Major Howard’s men extricate themselves, then charge towards the Caen Canal bridge.
12.19: Meanwhile, two other gliders have landed. The men inside manage to secure the other bridge — over the River Orne — without firing a shot. Partly this is because the two bridge sentries — a conscripted Pole and another soldier — are in a nearby brothel. Realising at last that something is amiss, they pull on their uniforms and run out into the street. Then they let off all their ammunition to give their German superiors the impression they’ve been in a firefight.
12.21: Platoon commander Lieutenant Dennis Fox, who has broken his arm, has found three Germans fast asleep in their dugouts, their rifles neatly stacked nearby. When he tries to wake them, they swear at him, thinking it’s a joke, and go back to sleep.
12.26: Both bridges are now secure, at a cost to the British unit of two dead and 14 wounded. Any German tanks coming from around Calais will now have to go via Caen, which is a six-hour detour. Air Chief Marshal Leigh-Mallory will call this glider operation the greatest flying feat of World War II.
12.50: Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway is at the door of a Dakota plane, about to jump. As he falls, he realises he is heading straight for the headquarters of a German battalion. Bullets start whizzing past him, and Otway slams into the side of the building. A German soldier opens a window, only to be met by a brick thrown by one of Otway’s men, who has landed in the garden. The British paratroopers then run away as fast as they can.
1.00: Strange objects are raining down over Normandy. From one plane, a British paratrooper drops a stuffed moose’s head that he’s stolen from a pub in Exeter. A U.S. paratrooper drops a baseball on which he’s written: ‘To Hell with you, Hitler.’
1.05: By the light of the moon, Colonel David Bruce — aboard the USS Tuscaloosa — can see scores of landing craft full of seasick troops. On most of them, the sick bags (‘Bag Vomit. For the use of’) have already been used, and the troops are resorting to using fire buckets or even their helmets.
1.30: Lt Col Terence Otway has arrived at an agreed rendezvous: a wood a mile east of the Germans’ bomb-proof bunker which was bristling with guns. Known as the Merville Battery, it must be knocked out before the British and Canadians start landing on the beach below. But something has gone badly wrong. Just 120 paratroopers of the planned 650 have made it to the rendezvous. Later, it turns out that most of the 32 planes carrying the 9th Battalion have dropped the parachutists and their equipment in the wrong place. This is chiefly because a large dust cloud — caused by RAF bombs — has decreased visibility. Tragically, 192 men will never be heard of again — the majority are assumed to have drowned in flooded fields and marshes.
American assault troops move onto a beachhead code-named Omaha Beach, on the northern coast of France on June 6, 1944, during the Allied invasion of the Normandy
US soldiers from the Army Corps of Engineers read letters on an unidentified beach captured during Operation Overlord on D-Day, France, early June 1944
1.45: Private Ken Russell of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment has just jumped out of a plane. Below him, he spots a house on fire. As he fights desperately to steer away from it, the fire is pulling both oxygen and his parachute towards the burning building. Then, suddenly, Russell hits the church steeple of Sainte-Mère-Église, his lines snagging the top. He’s now dangling over the edge of the steeple. The same thing happens to 22-year-old Private John Steele, whose foot is shattered by a German bullet just before he hits the steeple.
1.47: A redheaded German soldier in the town square looks up, spots Russell and Steele on the roof and lifts his machine-gun to fire. In an instant, Russell has cut his parachute lines, fallen to the ground unharmed, and run for the safety of some trees. Looking up, he sees Steele hanging lifeless from the steeple. In fact, Steele is playing dead. He’s tried to cut himself down but accidentally dropped his knife into the square. All he can do now is hang there and watch the Germans machine-gunning other parachutists as they land. Close by, Private Ernest Blanchard is hanging from a tree in the town square and hacking at his harness with a knife. He drops and runs. A few moments later, he’ll realise that he’s cut off the top of his thumb.
2.00: The German soldiers in the fields and villages of Normandy can hear strange ‘click click’ noises. To some, they sound like castanets, to others like crickets. The U.S. paratroopers have each been given two-cent toy clickers as a way of identifying themselves in the dark. One click must be met with two clicks. It’s an eerie sound, and it’s unnerving the Germans. However, one German patrol north of Sainte-Mère-Église has managed to round up 20 paratroopers by using a captured clicker. Every time an American responded to a single click, he was taken prisoner.
2.35: German medical orderly Fritz Müller is on a mercy mission, looking for wounded troops in the Normandy fields. Right now, he’s walking beneath trees filled with parachutes. Some have empty harnesses; some hold corpses. In a clearing, Müller finds an American paratrooper lying motionless on the ground, but he can’t tell if he’s dead or unconscious.
Kneeling over the American is a German soldier who’s rummaging through his pockets, and making crude comments about a picture of a girl that he’s found in the man’s wallet. Müller yells at him to stop talking about the girl and leave the poor man alone. The soldier refuses, pulls a ring off the paratrooper’s finger and walks away. Suddenly, there’s a gunshot and the German soldier drops down dead. Müller freezes, then kneels by the American parachutist, who he can now see is alive. Getting out his medical kit, he starts treating him as best he can.
Operation Overlord Normandy, Soldiers of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division have set up anti-aircraft guns on Juno Beach where they landed on D-Day on the outskirts of Bernieres-sur-Mer
SAS liberation parade, after the victory in Normandy
As Müller works, cigarettes start to fall around him. Only later does he realise that the cigarettes have been dropped by American parachutists still hanging in the trees. It was they who’d shot the German soldier, and the cigarettes were a thank you to Müller for defending, and then treating, their injured friend.
2.40: At his headquarters in Paris, the man in charge of the army in France, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, is studying the numerous reports coming in from Normandy. Naval headquarters say that their radar screens are covered with hundreds of blips — indeed, at first the operators thought there must be something wrong with their equipment. Von Rundstedt is unimpressed. ‘Maybe a flock of seagulls?’
2.50: Lt Col Terence Otway’s patience has been rewarded: 30 more men have arrived at the rendezvous. Now, he has to try to knock out the vital Merville four-gun battery defended by 200 men and surrounded by minefields and barbed wire. He takes stock of his paltry resources: 150 men, one Vickers machine-gun, 6 Bangalore torpedoes (instead of 60), a signal flare and a pigeon to send a message to England once the attack is over. Everything else is lost somewhere in the countryside.
3.15: Georges Gondrée, the owner of a café by the Caen canal bridge, hears knocking at the door. Opening it, he finds two men with smoking Sten guns and blackened faces. ‘Are there any Germans in the house?’ they ask in French. Gondrée says there aren’t. He’s getting nervous because he can’t place the men by their accent. There’s silence for a moment, then one of the parachutists says, ‘It’s all right, chum.’ Georges bursts into tears. They are English! The Gondrées are the first French family to be liberated.
102-year-old World War 2 veteran Gene Kleindl, from Rockford, Illinois, stands at the grave of his friend Ralph Gaddis at the Normandy American Cemetery on June 04, 2024
3.40: Gondrée is now digging in his garden to retrieve the 98 bottles of champagne that he hid in June 1940 when the Germans invaded.
His wife Thérèse’s face is grubby from hugging and kissing so many blackened British paratroopers. She will keep her face like that for three days, telling anyone who asks that the dirt has come from British soldiers and she’s proud of it.
3.45: At Sainte-Mère-Église, the church bell is tolling. Private John Steele is still hanging from the steeple, pretending to be dead. Most of the German garrison has now pulled out, but Chief Corporal Rudolph May and a colleague are still manning a machine-gun post in the steeple, just a few feet from Steele. They’ve assumed that the motionless parachutist must be dead — but now they suddenly hear him mutter something. May hauls Steele on to the roof, cuts off his harness with a pocket-knife and takes him prisoner. A few days later, Steele will manage to escape and rejoin his division. He’ll be deaf for weeks because he was so close to the loud ringing of the church bell.
4.00: Reports are coming in to the German general Erich Marcks that enemy parachutists are landing between Rouen and Le Havre. Marcks orders the 915th Regiment to intercept them immediately. In fact, they are dummies attached to parachutes, designed to pull German forces well away from the invasion beaches.
4.50: Outside the village of Saint-Côme-du-Mont, about five miles from Utah Beach, men of the 6th German Paratroop Regiment are amazed to see different coloured parachutes all over the fields. They get out their knives and start cutting them up to make silk scarves. Back at their base, other members of the regiment are waking up to discover that all their French drivers (who were forced to join the German Army in 1940) have deserted.
4.55: Against huge odds, Lt Col Otway and his men have captured the Germans’ Merville Battery, and now need to get out as quickly as possible to avoid Allied bombs. Of the 150 men who began the assault, 75 are dead or wounded. As no one knows the safe route out of the surrounding minefield, Otway asks his German POWs to lead the way. They refuse, so Otway tries a different tactic. ‘Well, OK, if you don’t show us the way through the mines, we’re going to start shooting the ground and you’re going to lose your feet — and maybe the mines will go up too.’ That does the trick.
5.10: Ninety-two landing craft are now heading for the Normandy coast. Most of the men are standing, as their heavy backpacks make it impossible to sit down. Many are thinking about what lies in store for them. In one boat, a young soldier asks the man next to him: ‘Mac, when a bullet hits you, does it go all the way through?’ On another, the men are singing in honour of their colleague Sergeant Walter Geldon. Today is his wedding anniversary. He will be dead before the day is out.
- D-Day Minute By Minute by Jonathan Mayo (Octopus Publishing Group, £12.99). To order a copy for £11.69 go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25. Promotional price valid until 31/06/2024.