Operation Overlord

INTRODUCTION
On June 5, 1944 Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower issued the Order of the Day. At 12:15 AM, June 6, 1944, 23,000 paratroopers and glider troopers plunged into the darkness and the allied troops; American, French, British and Canadian, stormed a 50-mile stretch of French beach called Normandy, D-Day had begun.

General Eisenhower started the morning off with this speech to the troops:
Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Forces: You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.
But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!
I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!
Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.
In midsummer 1943, a year before the Anglo-American invasion of Normandy that would lead to the liberation of western Europe, Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht, or armed forces, still occupied all the territory it had gained in the blitzkrieg campaigns of 1939-41 and most of its Russian conquests of 1941-42. It also retained its foothold on the coast of North Africa, acquired when it had gone to the aid of Italy in 1941. The Russian counteroffensives at Stalingrad and Kursk had pushed back the perimeter of Hitler’s Europe in the east. Germany or its allies still controlled the whole of mainland Europe, except for neutral Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Sweden. The Nazi war economy, though overshadowed by the growing of America’s, outmatched both that of Britain and that of the Soviet Union except in the key areas of tank and aircraft production. Without direct intervention by the western Allies on the continent, an intervention that would center on the western Allies commitment of a large American army, Hitler could count on prolonging his military dominance for years to come.
Since 1942, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had been pressing his allies; U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, to mount a ?second front? in the west but the circumstances would not permit it. America’s army was still forming, and the landing craft necessary to bring such an army across the English Channel had not yet been built. Britain had begun to prepare theoretical plans for a return to the continental mainland soon after the retreat from Dunkirk, France, in 1940. The Americans started to frame their own timetable immediately after Hitler declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941. Less inhibited than the British by perceived technical difficulties, the Americans pressed from the start for an early invasion, desirably in 1943, perhaps even in 1942. To that end, George C. Marshall, Roosevelt’s chief of staff, appointed a prot?g?, Dwight D. Eisenhower, to the U.S. Army’s war plans division in December 1941 and commissioned him to design an operational scheme for Allied victory.
Eisenhower convinced President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill that the priority had to be ?Germany First?. He framed proposals for a 1943 invasion (Operation ?Roundup?), and another (Operation ?Sledgehammer?) for 1942 in the event of a Russian collapse or a sudden weakening of Germany’s position. Both plans were presented to the British in London in April 1942, and