It was not only the scale of the operation, with a total of nearly 3 million personnel, 11, aircraft and 7, ships involved, and , troops and 20, vehicles in the first wave. Its complexity, its ingenuity and imagination and its decisive effect on the war in Europe make it unique, in quality as well as scale. The historian Ambrose observed that the Battle of Normandy was four times greater than the Desert Storm Operation in the Gulf War, and it was carried out when there were no GPS, computers, fax machines and photocopiers, and documents were typed with several carbon sheets.
There have been numerous documents on the D-Day — 6 June when Allies troops landed on Normandy beaches and paratroopers jumped far inland — and even recently there are more documents providing new information.
This article compiles latest information available in order to present the big and truthful picture to the extent possible. The landing on D-Day is often called Operation Overlord, but in fact it was only a small segment of Operation Neptune, and it was even a smaller segment of Operation Overlord. The scope is confined in the preparation steps and the first 24 hours of the battle.
During the 8th and 9th centuries, attracted by the riches of the province with which they had often traded, Vikings ventured down in their long boats each summer from their Scandinavian homelands to raid the monasteries and towns, reaching Paris in If the German had known that Normandy was an area of choice for invasion and for beachheads, they would have defended the area better.
Then the Allies invation would have faced with difficulties, even failure. On the first day of the battle, the Allies could transport only 8 infantry divisions to Normandy beaches and drop 3 airborne divisions on land, whereas Germany had more than 60 divisions in France. The order was in response to the high levels of success commandos had been having behind German lines, and required the immediate execution of all commandos on sight, irrespective of uniform, rank or whether they were trying to surrender.
