6th June: D-Day

Today is the 70th anniversary of D-Day - some things you might not know about D-Day:

1. The D in D-Day stands for "Day", a common term in the planning of military operations likely to last several days. D-Day meant the day the operation would begin, the next day was D+1, the one after that D+2 and so on. H-Hour was also used to indicate the time the operation was to start. Then, if the date or time of the operation had to change, there were less alterations to make to the plans.
2. This was in fact the case with D-Day 1944. It was planned to take place on June 5th but the weather was too bad (well, it was Britain!) It almost didn't happen on June 6th, either, because although the weather had improved a bit, conditions still weren't perfect. However, General Eisenhower decided to go ahead - the attack was to start before dawn, so they needed the full moon and also high tide, which meant there were only a few days in the month when the attack would be possible. The weather did make the invasion more difficult, but also provided an advantage because it lulled the Germans into a false sense of security ("They won't attack in this weather") and so the Allies took them by surprise.
3. The whole operation was cloaked in secrecy. The Germans knew the invasion would come sooner or later - their intelligence had noticed all the forces amassing in Britain - but they didn't know exactly when or where, and it was vital they didn't find out until D-Day. Hence the code names - Operation Overlord for the whole invasion, Neptune for the beach assault. Even the troops had no idea until the last minute. The maps they used for training had false names on them. The plan was to mislead the Germans into thinking the allied attack was going to be in a different location entirely.
4. The five beaches in the location were all given code names, Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. Each beach was divided into zones, with each zone also having a code name: Omaha was divided into Charlie, Dog, Easy and Fox zones; Utah, Tare Green, Uncle Red and Victor; Gold, How, Item, Jig and King zones; Juno, Love, Mike and Nan zones, and Sword Oboe, Peter, Queen and Roger zones.
5. Authorities had a scare that the secret was compromised when, as they completed their daily Times Crossword, the solutions to the clues, over several weeks just before the attack, included the code words for all five beaches, the code words for the operation, Overlord and Neptune, and the codeword for the floating harbours used in the landings, Mulberry. MI5 mobilised and brought in the crossword compiler for questioning. Leonard Dawe, a Surrey headmaster, and his colleague Melville Jones were put through the mill, but no evidence of spying or foul play was found. It seemed as if the whole thing was just a spooky coincidence. More recently, though, a possible explanation has emerged. Dawe's method of crossword compilation was to invite pupils into his study and get them to fill solutions into a crossword grid, then Dawe would make up clues to the words they used. There were American and Canadian soldiers camped near the school, and it seems likely that boys overheard conversations including the code words which then came out, perfectly innocently, when they were asked to provide words for the crossword.
6. The first troops to attack on D-Day were paratroopers. They jumped out of planes and landed in the dead of night behind enemy lines. Their mission was to destroy key targets and capture bridges so that the main invasion force could move. In this phase, as well as the troops, thousands of dummies were thrown out of the planes as well, to confuse the Germans and draw fire.
7. The 82nd Airborne Division of the US Army lost around 16% of their troops on D-Day, because of the time it took to unbuckle their parachutes once they were on the ground, which gave the Germans enough time to shoot them. As a consequence, the American troops started using British quick release buckles from then on.
8. The first British casualties on D-Day were Lt. Den Brotheridge of the 6th Airborne Division (shot in the neck) and Lance Corporal Fred Greehalgh (drowned). The first US casualty was Lt. Robert Mathias of the 82nd Airborne Division. He sustained a bullet wound in the chest right before he jumped out of his aircraft. He commanded his men to follow his lead as he jumped from the plane, but he died before he reached the ground.
9. Taking part in the assault were 156,000 Allied troops, 5,000 boats, 50,000 vehicles and 11,000 planes. The troops were mostly from Britain, the USA, Canada, France and Norway, but there were also soldiers from Australia, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and Poland. It was the largest seaborne invasion in history.
10. The French Resistance also played a significant part, and had their own missions with code names to carry out: Plan Vert was to sabotage the rail system; Plan Bleu, destroying electrical facilities; Plan Tortue was a delaying operation aimed at the enemy forces that would potentially reinforce Axis forces at Normandy, and Plan Violet, cutting underground telephone and teleprinter cables. The BBC's French radio service transmitted coded messages disguised as quotations from poetry or literature gave the Resistance their signals to begin each operation. An increase in radio transmissions on June 5th did alert the Germans, but sheer volume of previous transmissions and false alarms meant that most of them ignored it.