The Normandy Landings, D-Day – “Operation Overlord.”

On June 6, 1944, “D-Day”, the Allied forces made their long-awaited invasion of Europe, under the command of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Allied commander in Europe. The invasion took place on beaches in Normandy, France. It was called “Operation Overlord.” http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/dday/overlord.aspx; https://www.britannica.com/event/Normandy-Invasion)

The location was a big surprise to the Germans, who were expecting the invasion to take place north of Normandy in the area around Calais. The Allies used many different tactics to convince the Nazis that the target of the invasion was Calais, not Normandy, from intentionally “losing” false documents with different battle plans, the use of counterspies who planted false information, diversionary movement of forces, and the use of carrier pigeons by the French Resistance with misinformation. (Id.)

In addition, elaborate efforts were taken in order to deceive the Germans into thinking that a massive Allied force was concentrated in Kent—just opposite Calais. Radio traffic was faked, plywood and canvas installations were constructed, inflatable tanks and vehicles were used extensively in order to deceive the Germans. Deserted tent encampments were setup. Dummy landing crafts were placed along the north eastern coast. The pattern of air bombardment was arranged to indicate Calais was where the invasion would happen. The efforts were very successful and led the Germans to keep their main forces in the Calais area even after the actual invasion had started. (Id.)

Operating the Overlord project was a huge logistical challenge. For the actual invasion 6,000 ships were needed to carry troops and equipment. In the first three days of the attack, Overlord planned to move over 100,000 men and nearly 13,000 vehicles. The plan included the movement of artificial harbours known as “Mulberry Harbours” so that people and materials could be landed with more ease once the landing beaches had been secured. (Id.)

The sites of the landings on a front of 30 miles were Omaha Beach, the most difficult, Utah beach, Gold beach, Sword beach, and Juno beach. The first wave scheduled to hit Omaha and Utah beaches was composed of 60,000 men and 6,800 vehicles for each location. In the next two days, another 43,500 troops and 6,000 vehicles were scheduled to reach Normandy. Similar numbers of British/Canadian troops were assigned the other landing areas. Altogether, nearly three million men in 47 divisions were deployed for the invasion. Most of the divisions, 21, were American; the rest were primarily British and Canadian, with some French, Polish, Belgian, Italian, and Czech soldiers thrown in. Air support would be provided by 5,000 fighter planes. In addition, tens of thousands of paratroopers from the American 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions, plus hundreds of gliders landed behind German lines to disrupt communications, destroy bridges and roads to prevent reinforcements, and to secure objectives approximately five miles inland. Of the 23,000 airborne troops, 15,500 were Americans and of these, 6,000 were killed or seriously wounded. (Id.)

A song about Operation Overlord is “The Longest Day, by Iron Maiden (2006). (https://youtu.be/BSJ8rDlBZ_I)

In the gloom the gathering storm abates
In the ships gimlet eyes await
The call to arms to hammer at the gates
To blow them wide throw evil to it’s fate

All summers long the drills to build the machine
To turn men from flesh and blood to steel
From paper soldiers to bodies on the beach
From summer sands to Armageddon’s reach

Overlord, your master not your god
The enemy coast dawning grey with scud
These wretched souls puking, shaking fear
To take a bullet for those who sent them here

The world’s alight, the cliffs erupt in flame
No escape, remorseless shrapnel rains
Drowning men no chance for a warrior’s fate
A choking death enter hell’s gate

Sliding we go, only fear on our side
To the edge of the wire,
And we rush with the tide
Oh the water is red,
With the blood of the dead
But I’m still alive, pray to God I survive

How long on this longest day
‘Til we finally make it through
How long on this longest day
‘Til we finally make it through

How long on this longest day
‘Til we finally make it through
How long on this longest day
‘Til we finally make it through
The rising dead, faces bloated torn
They are relieved, the living wait their turn
Your number’s up, the bullet’s got your name
You still go on, to hell and back again

Valhalla waits, Valkyries rise and fall
The warrior tombs, lie open for us all
A ghostly hand reaches through the veil
Blood and sand, we will prevail

Sliding we go, only fear on our side
To the edge of the wire,
And we rush with the tide
Oh the water is red,
With the blood of the dead
But I’m still alive, pray to God I survive

How long on this longest day
‘Til we finally make it through
How long on this longest day
‘Til we finally make it through

How long on this longest day
‘Til we finally make it through
How long on this longest day

The Allies landed on five different beachheads in Normandy. The US was responsible for some, The British were responsible for others, and combined Allied forces landed at still others. One of the beaches where the British landed was “Sword”. Among those who landed was a 21 year old Scottish boy name Bill Millin, who was not armed with a weapon, but with bagpipes. Millin’s role in the landings is told in his obituary..

“Any reasonable observer might have thought Bill Millin was unarmed as he jumped off the landing ramp at Sword Beach, in Normandy, on June 6th 1944. Unlike his colleagues, the pale 21-year-old held no rifle in his hands. Of course, in full Highland rig as he was, he had his trusty skean dhu, his little dirk, tucked in his right sock. But that was soon under three feet of water as he waded ashore, a weary soldier still smelling his own vomit from a night in a close boat on a choppy sea, and whose kilt in the freezing water was floating prettily round him like a ballerina’s skirt.
But Mr. Millin was not unarmed; far from it. He held his pipes, high over his head at first to keep them from the wet (for while whisky was said to be good for the bag, salt water wasn’t), then cradled in his arms to play. And bagpipes, by long tradition, counted as instruments of war. An English judge had said so after the Scots’ great defeat at Culloden in 1746; a piper was a fighter like the rest, and his music was his weapon. The whining skirl of the pipes had struck dread into the Germans on the Somme, who had called the kilted pipers “Ladies from Hell”. And it raised the hearts and minds of the home side, so much so that when Mr. Millin played on June 5th, as the troops left for France past the Isle of Wight and he was standing on the bowsprit just about keeping his balance above the waves getting rougher, the wild cheers of the crowd drowned out the sound of his pipes even to himself.
His playing had been planned as part of the operation. On commando training near Fort William he had struck up a friendship with Lord Lovat, the officer in charge of the 1st Special Service Brigade. Not that they had much in common. Mr. Millin was short, with a broad cheeky face, the son of a Glasgow policeman; his sharpest childhood memory was of being one of the “poor”, sleeping on deck, on the family’s return in 1925 from Canada to Scotland. Lovat was tall, lanky, outrageously handsome and romantic, with a castle towering above the river at Beauly, near Inverness. He had asked Mr. Millin to be his personal piper: not a feudal but a military arrangement. The War Office in London now forbade pipers to play in battle, but Mr. Millin and Lord Lovat, as Scots, plotted rebellion. In this “greatest invasion in history”, Lovat wanted pipes to lead the way.
He was ordering now, as they waded up Sword Beach, in that drawly voice of his: “Give us a tune, piper.” Mr. Millin thought him a mad bastard. The man beside him, on the point of jumping off, had taken a bullet in the face and gone under. But there was Lovat, strolling through fire quite calmly in his aristocratic way, allegedly wearing a monogrammed white pullover under his jacket and carrying an ancient Winchester rifle, so if he was mad Mr. Millin thought he might as well be ridiculous too, and struck up “Hielan’ Laddie”. Lovat approved it with a thumbs-up, and asked for “The Road to the Isles”. Mr. Millin inquired, half-joking, whether he should walk up and down in the traditional way of pipers. “Oh, yes. That would be lovely.”
Three times therefore he walked up and down at the edge of the sea. He remembered the sand shaking under his feet from mortar fire and the dead bodies rolling in the surf, against his legs. For the rest of the day, whenever required, he played. He piped the advancing troops along the raised road by the Caen canal, seeing the flashes from the rifle of a sniper about 100 yards ahead, noticing only after a minute or so that everyone behind him had hit the deck in the dust. When Lovat had dispatched the sniper, he struck up again. He led the company down the main street of Bénouville playing “Blue Bonnets over the Border”, refusing to run when the commander of 6 Commando urged him to; pipers walked as they played.
He took them across two bridges, one (later renamed the Pegasus Bridge) ringing and banging as shrapnel hit the metal sides, one merely with railings which bullets whistled through: “the longest bridge I ever piped across.” Those two crossings marked their successful rendezvous with the troops who had preceded them. All the way, he learned later, German snipers had had him in their sights but, out of pity for this madman, had not fired. That was their story. Mr. Millin himself knew he wasn’t going to die. Piping was too enjoyable, as he had discovered in the Boys’ Brigade band and all through his short army career. And piping protected him.
The Nut-Brown Maiden
The pipes themselves were less lucky, injured by shrapnel as he dived into a ditch. He could still play them, but four days later they took a direct hit on the chanter and the drone when he had laid them down in the grass, and that was that. The last tune they had piped on D-Day was “The Nut-Brown Maiden”, played for a small red-haired French girl who, with her folks cowering behind her, had asked him for music as he passed their farm.
He gave the pipes later to the museum at the Pegasus Bridge, which he often revisited, and sometimes piped across, during his long and quiet post-war career as a mental nurse at Dawlish in Devon. On one such visit, in full Highland rig with his pipes in his arms, he was approached by a smartly dressed woman of a certain age, with faded red hair, who planted a joyous kiss of remembrance on his cheek.”
You can find “Hieland Laddie”, “Road to the Isles”, and “Brown Haired Maiden”, the tunes played by Bill Millin, piper to Simon Fraser (Lord Lovat) during the D-Day landing. Peter Walker, piper, at https://youtu.be/c7DgoO9YdaI

 

Reinforcements for the infantry came ashore during the days that followed D-Day. More than three million follow-up troops landed in Western Europe. On June 26, 1944 the Allies captured the French port of Cherbourg. After that, the Germans began to retreat. On August 25, 1944 came the day that the French had been waiting for, Paris was liberated. D-Day forced the Germans to fight a two front war again just as they had in World War I. Yet again, the Germans could not handle war on both sides of them.