D-Day: The Planning and Execution of the Allied Invasion of Europe

hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of megaprojects this is another one where we get a bit abstract and as i always do say if you've got a suggestion for mega projects and it can be abstract like this hit me up in the comments below we tend to make the ones that rise to the top so do that and let's get into it but before we do i will say that this video is brought to you by news voice the news is broken almost all u.s media is owned by just a handful of giant corporations also fake news bit of a problem as well and finding something unbiased can be pretty hard news voice is revolutionizing the news landscape it's an app that gives you a personalized news feed by aggregating major news sites as well as international independent media giving it's a much needed balance each news story shows multiple sources which are all tagged with their bias and perspective the news affects almost everything in our lives what we hear and read it shapes which people we trust what we eat what we buy how we vote even how we think newsvoice is created by its readers so you can upload stories that you find interesting so more people will see them it's essentially a democratized platform for news plus it saves you time you can get all of your news all of the sources in one app so you can be better informed and is also totally free what get started with news voice today through the link below it's free it's on google play it's on the app store just go get it and let's get into the video [Music] june 6 1944 operation overlord or d-day as it is commonly referred to although operational overlord also super badass name it remains the largest combined military operation that the world has ever seen and with any hope it's going to stay that way for a long time to come the numbers involved with the cataclysmic battle for europe which began in 1944 are simply extraordinary d-day saw over a hundred and fifty-six thousand allied troops land on the shores of normandy and were faced by roughly fifty thousand german soldiers a total of 6939 ships and landing crafts along with 195 700 sailors took part in the amphibious section of d-day known as operation neptune while 10 440 aircraft were involved dropping parachutists bombs or patrolling the skies to prevent any incursion by the luftwaffe the events of june 6 1944 have been told countless times and while we're certainly going to be covering the event itself we want to take a much closer look into just how the allies managed to organize and pull off such an astonishing invasion as breathtaking as d-day was it was the meticulous planning over many years that really ensured its success [Music] while most know the details of what happened on d-day let's just have a quick recap shall we four years before d-day the allies reached their lowest point as hitler's army stormed through france the british expeditionary force and what remained of the french army became pinned down near dunkirk nearly four hundred thousand allied soldiers now had nowhere to go as the germans approached only the quite extraordinary civilian flotilla which answered the government's call for assistance had prevented all-out disaster and 338 soldiers made it back across the channel soon after winston churchill was told that without american aid british forces would not be going back anytime soon but make no mistake about it going back is exactly what they eventually would have to do by the end of 1941 something was becoming clear well actually two things were becoming clear britain was not about to collapse as many had predicted but hitler's invasion of the soviet union was the battle of britain was supposed to be a way of breaking the will of the british people through countless bombing raids and so softening the country up for an impending invasion but britain stood firm and eventually the many valiant pilots and their raf planes began to push the luftwaffe back if this was a setback to hitler's plans the horrific circumstances that had developed after the german invasion of the ussr was considerably worse the appalling events of stalingrad would be decisive the imperious german war machine had finally been defeated at this point soviet leader joseph stalin was feverishly petitioning president roosevelt and prime minister winston churchill to open up a secondary front by invading france but this was an action still years off the planning that went into d-day was mind-boggling the allies had gone through some rocky amphibious operations including painful lessons at dunkirk dieppe north africa and sicily a meeting in tehran in late 1943 between roosevelt churchill and stalin said a rough time scale of when the invasion would happen but the exact details were kept well under wraps in fact the majority of the most important decisions had yet to be made there was of course the small matter of where exactly the invasion would take place calais was close but was it maybe too obvious the beaches of normandy came with pros and cons it was a relatively broad area and would allow a huge thrust southward into france the location was also closed to sherborg and kane to ports that could be targeted but the lack of port facilities on the actual landing zones was a problem and meant that an amphibious assault would be needed on a larger scale than anything ever attempted while we all know what happened on the morning of the 6th of june in reality the battle had begun long before whether it was the complex deception plans which managed to bamboozle the germans or the relentless attacks on supply lines and enemy aircraft d-day was merely the culmination of months if not years of hard work and persistence operation fortitude may not be so well known but it likely saved thousands of lives allied leaders knew the danger of a devastating counter-attack once they had a foothold on the beaches of normandy with the sea to their backs a fierce attack by hitler's dreaded panzer divisions could really obliterate the allied forces they needed a way to confuse the germans on where exactly the landing would take place and so spread german defenders over an area as wide as possible and the result was simply brilliant through a series of fake camps including dummy tanks and ships and some of the most thrilling double agent escapades you're likely to ever read that on straight from a spy novel the allies were able to sow doubt in hitler's mind by building fake military camps in scotland they were able to give the impression that norway might be the main target another camp near dover showed that surely the allies would land in calais not only this they even created fictitious units including the completely mythical u.s first army group to add authenticity general george patton who allied commanders rightly believed the germans feared more than any other general was placed in command of this fake army group but if we want to mention a single person and their role in operation fortitude it must surely be juan pujol garcia codenamed garbo garcia's military involvement in d-day itself was actually non-existent but the work he did during its lead up was extraordinary the spanish spy acted as a double agent but with an allegiance to britain over two years he's had fake information to the germans through 27 fictitious spies that he and mi5 created together costing the germans around 340 thousand dollars which is about five million dollars today many of gaucia's reports were taken directly to hitler and he was certainly responsible for why many of the panzer divisions were not moved down from calais after the invasion had begun his vast and complex deception plan had worked better than most had ever envisioned and garcia holds the peculiar honor of receiving an iron cross by hitler in 1944 and an mbe from king george vi in the very same year the transport plan which was carried out between march and august 1944 was designed to cause huge damage to both german transportation routes and communication lines wave after wave of british and u.s bombers hit the not only coastal region of normandy but well into france this effectively crippled the french railway system in the area and significantly hampered the german response operation point blank began a full year before the invasion of europe got underway from june 1943 allied aircraft began attacking aircraft factories and airfields across occupied europe to destroy as much of the luftwaffe as possible and prevent it from playing a major role in d-day and well that was exactly what happened general reconnaissance was another huge undertaking and over 3200 sorties were flown in the months leading up to d-day which carefully photographed the area back in britain a request by the government for holiday photos and postcards from normandy was met with great enthusiasm as the british population proved eager to do their bit for the impending invasion while officially nothing was said about the invasions with troops and equipment pouring into britain it certainly felt like something was building [Music] the logistics behind the invasion are often overlooked it's just not as exciting to talk about how many razor blades were needed or how they brought food in to feed over a hundred thousand men instead of the actual heroism during battle but countless armies have learned through history that when supplies run out you're finished but it wasn't simply getting all of this equipment and supplies across the english channel that was the problem the vast majority of it had been produced in the united states and for the better part of two years convoys churned back and forth across the atlantic slowly building up the most astonishing stockpile the world had ever seen each man who landed in normandy required roughly 10 ship tons of equipment and supplies with an additional ton for every 30 days the army service units began amassing huge amounts of just about everything you can imagine initially considerable effort was put into trying to camouflage it all but in the end the amount became too big to even try to hide it entire fields became ammunition dumps truck depots or vast wooden boxes that carried everything an army on the move would need luckily by this time the allies had gained a degree of air superiority and few enemy aircraft were ever seen above britain during the day and that was just in britain itself these depots in the greenfields of southern england were just the end of the line in a monstrous supply chain that reached across the atlantic and included an estimated 22.7 million square meters 245 million square feet of storage space in the united states the timetable of equipment and supply movement usually came down to two things requisitions from supply officers in england and the availability of ships at the time for this reason some periods saw considerably more shipments than others in one month alone 1.5 million tons of equipment left new york city bound for the uk after the initial landing two enormous prefabricated landing zones were assembled on the beaches known as mulberry harbors it had taken six months and 55 thousand workers to construct the components for these harbours using 210 000 tons of steel and a million tonnes of concrete that's four times the amount of steel used in the sydney harbour bridge and an astonishing 10 times the amount used to build the burj khalifa while few would ever have claimed to have been prepared for the horrors of d-day it was a set of actions that had been practiced time and time again through air reconnaissance french resistance small boats and even submarines the allies had been able to build up a considerable picture of what the soldiers would face on d-day on the beaches of southern england a replica of hitler's famed west wall which defended europe had been constructed and those who would storm the real thing had plenty of practice but it is one of the painfully overlooked aspects of the build-up that the number who died during these practices was enormous there were many naval accidents friendly fire incidents and plane crashes to contend with though the number of those who died during the build-up to d-day has never been fully established some historians claim that it is in fact comparable to how many died on the day itself one of the largest such rehearsals operation tiger came just two months before the real thing it began on the 27th of april 1944 when a friendly fire accident on the first day left a large number dead eisenhower had ordered that troops get into the kind of real-life experience they would face in normandy and real ammunition was used to fire above landing troops while it's not clear what happened as this was quickly covered up there were rumors that 450 men were killed during the incident but that was never clarified the next day a convoy approaching the coast was attacked by a group of german e-boats and the resulting short battle led to the deaths of 749 u.s servicemen [Music] a letter to allied troops from eisenhower on the eve of d-day read 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 nobody would have dared to say it on the day but the beginning of the end for the nazi occupation of europe was here a system called movement control was implemented so that ships would leave at the same time from 20 different locations across the southern english coast the ships then rendezvoused at a spot close to the isle of wight nicknamed piccadilly circus where they formed into convoys and eventually began to steam south ahead of the minesweepers began combing the seas clearing a path for the gigantic convoys a little-known fact about d-day is that the first casualties were not on the beaches nor were they descending from planes the first to die on the evening of the 5th of june 1944 were six sailors aboard the uss osprey a minesweeper that hit a mine and sank in the english channel just before midnight 1 200 aircraft departed from airfields across southern england on board were three divisions of airborne troops roughly 24 000 men that would be parachuted behind enemy lines the vast majority of these missed their landing zones and the casualty rate among these soldiers was among the highest on d-day as dawn broke the german century saw for the first time the giant armada that stretched across the horizon at 5 45 am 20 cruisers 65 destroyers and two monitors began to bombard the german positions a roughly 6 30 am the first landing crafts involved in d-day arrived at the beaches the americans at omaha and utah the british on golden sword and the canadians at juno omaha was by far the bloodiest battle with two thousand men losing their lives on the beach but even here german resistance was eventually broken and the allies began moving off the beaches and further inland [Music] there was of course more to come in the liberation of europe and indeed for the liberation of normandy and then france but d-day had proven to be a success the casualty rate had been lower than expected but not by a huge margin and the numbers are still sobering just over 4 000 allied troops died on june the sixth alone while estimates of german losses range between four thousand and ten thousand it's believed that over 150 000 german soldiers died between d-day and the middle of august as their armies and eventually the fatherland began to collapse the cost on the civilian population was also horrific as many as twenty thousand french civilians were killed during the liberation of normandy while estimates of those who died during the pre-invasion bombing are believed to be roughly fifteen thousand it is sometimes said that normandy was sacrificed for the greater good during the invasion of europe and there is certainly something to be said for that the brutal battle for kane had decimated the historic city leaving just eight thousand livable quarters for a population of over sixty thousand in the small region of calvary's where the invasion centered 76 000 people had become homeless the allies were pushing the germans back towards germany but utter devastation was left behind d-day remains perhaps the most iconic military campaign it was a classic good versus evil fight that led to the end of the bloodiest war the world has ever known despite the carnage associated with the 6th of june 1944 it is an event that we keep returning to we replay the events again and again there is something oddly transfixing about this titanic invasion had it failed it would be remembered in a very different light but it did succeed and it preceded the final fight back that ended world war ii but it is only when you take a step back and look at the entire event that began over two years beforehand involving vast supply lines fake military camps a wonderfully deceptive spaniard and the largest force ever to be put to sea do we see d-day for the truly extraordinary project that it really was and one that we all hope will never need to undertake again so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe and as always thank you for watching

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 197,563

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Id: 080OM4_s00w

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020