91 Fun Facts About D-Day

Which capital did the Allies liberate on 25 August 1944, eleven weeks after D-Day?

Paris was freed as the Battle of Normandy ended; five days later the last German units retreated east across the Seine, closing the campaign that D-Day had opened.

D-Day opened which codenamed Allied campaign, the Battle of Normandy, that ended with the Germans retreating across the Seine?

Operation Overlord was first drawn up as a three-division assault; in early 1944 its commanders widened it to five divisions on a broader front, and the wait for extra landing craft pushed the date back to June.

Which Allied leader kept pressing for a 'second front' to relieve his armies?

Joseph Stalin began pressing for it after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941; at Tehran in late 1943 he at last won a British and American promise to invade France by May 1944.

Who served as the Supreme Allied Commander overseeing the D-Day invasion?

Dwight D. Eisenhower drafted, and never had to release, a note taking sole blame in case the landings failed.

The wooden poles planted in Normandy's fields to wreck Allied gliders were nicknamed Rommel's what?

Asparagus: on Rommel's orders the Rommelspargel went up in likely landing fields, often strung with tripwires and topped with mines, to deter paratroopers as well.

What was the specific code name for the naval assault phase of the D-Day landings?

Operation Neptune began with minesweepers clearing lanes across the Channel through the night, ahead of the bombardment ships and the landing craft that followed them in to the five beaches.

Operation Bodyguard took its name from Churchill's remark that wartime truth needs a 'bodyguard of' what?

Lies: 'In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies,' Churchill said at the Tehran Conference, and the D-Day deception plan took the phrase as its name.

Whose intervention finally kept Winston Churchill from sailing with the invasion fleet on D-Day?

King George VI stepped in after the prime minister announced he would watch the landings from a warship; Churchill stayed ashore and first set foot in Normandy six days after D-Day.

American 'Rhino' tanks in Normandy were fitted with steel tusks to cut through what?

Hedgerows: the banked, tangled bocage inland of the beaches bogged the Americans down, so crews welded on prongs cut from the Germans' own steel beach obstacles.

Which future Star Trek actor landed at Juno Beach on D-Day as a Canadian artillery officer?

James Doohan, later Scotty, led his men ashore and through a minefield; that night a nervous Canadian sentry hit him with six bullets, costing him the middle finger of his right hand.

Which unit scaled the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc under Lieutenant Colonel James Earl Rudder?

The US Army Rangers of Rudder's 2nd Ranger Battalion climbed the Pointe du Hoc cliff with ropes and ladders; the battery's guns had been moved inland, where a Ranger patrol found and disabled them.

Fortitude South, the main deception under Plan Bodyguard, faked a threat to which stretch of coast?

Fortitude South pointed at the Pas-de-Calais, the shortest Channel crossing, using a fictitious First US Army Group in Kent; German reserves were held there for weeks after 6 June.

Which American offensive, launched seven weeks after D-Day, finally broke out of the Normandy beachhead?

Operation Cobra opened on 25 July near Saint-Lô while British and Canadian attacks held German armour around Caen; within a week the Americans had reached Avranches, the gateway to Brittany.

Which British general commanded all Allied ground forces in the Normandy campaign until 1 September 1944?

Bernard Montgomery ran the land battle until the Supreme Commander took direct control on 1 September 1944; Churchill had him promoted to field marshal by way of compensation.

The Normandy landings hold what record in military history?

The largest seaborne invasion in history put about 156,000 troops ashore in a day, yet none of the towns set as first-day objectives fell, and the five beachheads did not join up until 12 June.

Which deep-water port at the tip of the Cotentin peninsula did American troops capture three weeks after D-Day?

Cherbourg's garrison wrecked the harbour so thoroughly before surrendering that the port took weeks to reopen, so supplies kept coming over the beaches.

The Supreme Commander's order of the day told D-Day troops they were about to embark upon the 'Great' what?

Crusade: 'The eyes of the world are upon you,' the order went on; it was issued to the soldiers, sailors and airmen of the invasion force as they set out.

What were the mine-clearing, demolition and bridging tanks of Normandy nicknamed?

Hobart's Funnies took their name from Major-General Percy Hobart, who had been forced into retirement and was serving as a Home Guard lance corporal when Churchill had him recalled to train armoured divisions.

Group Captain James Stagg persuaded the Supreme Commander to delay D-Day by a day in what role?

Chief meteorologist Stagg then forecast a brief lull for 6 June; had the fleet waited, the next suitable tides were two weeks away, without the full moon the airborne troops wanted.

Which British admiral, flag officer at Dover during Dunkirk, commanded the D-Day naval operations?

Bertram Ramsay had retired in 1938 and was coaxed back a year later; having brought the army home from Dunkirk in 1940, he planned and led the fleet that carried it back to France four years on.

Which Hollywood mogul produced The Longest Day, hiring three directors and an all-star international cast?

Darryl F. Zanuck had to talk a Fox board reeling from the runaway cost of Cleopatra into paying for his D-Day epic, and it became the box-office hit he had promised them.

Which town behind Utah Beach did American paratroopers free in the first hours of D-Day, among the first liberated in France?

Sainte-Mère-Église was taken by the 82nd Airborne; a fire in the town that night lit up the paratroopers as they came down, and many were shot in the air or caught in trees and on poles.

Private Bill Millin famously did what as Lord Lovat's commandos came ashore at Sword?

Played the bagpipes: Millin pointed out that regulations kept pipers out of the firing line, and Lovat answered that those were the English War Office's rules and the two of them were Scottish.

Which future baseball Hall of Famer crewed a Navy rocket boat off the Normandy beaches on D-Day?

Yogi Berra, a 19-year-old gunner's mate from the transport USS Bayfield, spent D-Day in a six-man boat firing rockets and machine guns at the German defences.

Which brigadier general at Utah Beach decided to 'start the war from right here' after the landings drifted?

Theodore Roosevelt Jr., eldest son of President Theodore Roosevelt and assistant commander of the 4th Infantry Division, ordered later waves re-routed to the new spot; he received the Medal of Honor.

Which German formation, unexpectedly in position, opposed the American landings at Omaha?

The 352nd Infantry Division had moved into the coastal defences unnoticed, a rare breakdown of Allied intelligence; reports written after the battle still assumed it had arrived by chance days earlier, on an exercise.

Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis won the only D-Day Victoria Cross for actions on which beach?

Gold Beach: Hollis of the 6th Green Howards attacked two pillboxes at the Mont Fleury battery and later rescued trapped men at Crépon, the only Victoria Cross won on D-Day.

Which British formation was the assault force at Gold Beach?

The 50th (Northumbrian) Division was given Gold as a veteran formation that had already fought in France, North Africa and Sicily; by evening its men had taken Arromanches on the western flank.

Where was Band, D-Day's unused sixth beach?

East of Sword: Band was considered for the far side of the Orne and never used, so Sword stayed the eastern end of the landings; British airborne troops held the ground beyond the river instead.

Which formation mounted the only German armoured counter-attack on D-Day, halting the advance on Caen?

The 21st Panzer Division drove into the gap between Sword and Juno that afternoon and pulled back by nightfall; it was the day's only armoured counter-attack.

Which Canadian objective on D-Day was an airport west of Caen?

Carpiquet airfield was a first-day objective, yet the Canadians did not take it until 9 July, more than a month later; the village beside it fell days earlier while the airfield held out.

Seized by glider-borne troops in the opening hours of D-Day, the Bénouville bridge over the Caen Canal was later renamed what?

Pegasus Bridge took its new name later in 1944 from the winged horse on the British airborne forces' shoulder badge; the glider troops had seized it within ten minutes of landing.

Which major led the 181-man glider force that seized the Caen Canal and Orne bridges on D-Day?

John Howard's D Company took both bridges within ten minutes of the first glider crashing into the canal bridge's wire at 00:16, the first Allied action of D-Day.

The 155 mm guns of the Pointe du Hoc battery were French pieces of a design dating from which conflict?

The First World War: the battery's guns were French GPF pieces designed in 1917 and taken over by the Germans, who had moved them off the headland before D-Day while they rebuilt the site.

What wrecked the American Mulberry harbour at Omaha Beach less than two weeks after D-Day?

A three-day storm from the north-east struck on 19 June before the pontoons were firmly anchored; the Americans abandoned the harbour and went back to landing supplies over the open beach.

In the Mulberry harbours, what were the concrete caissons called?

The concrete caissons were Phoenixes, cast in Britain in several sizes, towed across the Channel and flooded to settle on the seabed as the harbour's breakwater.

The Higgins boat landing craft used on D-Day was typically built from what material?

Plywood: Andrew Higgins based the craft on shallow-draft boats he had built for work in swamps and marshes, adding a steel bow ramp so that 36 men could charge straight onto a beach.

In which US city were Higgins boats built?

Higgins Industries built them in New Orleans, Louisiana, where Andrew Higgins had moved from the lumber business into boatbuilding; the city now houses the National WWII Museum.

Which American general was put in command of the phantom First US Army Group for Operation Fortitude?

George Patton, sidelined after slapping two soldiers in Sicily, was free to play the decoy: German agents were fed reports that he was preparing the real invasion army.

Fortitude North, staged out of Scotland, threatened an Allied invasion of which occupied country?

Norway was the target: Fortitude North invented a British Fourth Army headquartered in Edinburgh, with fake radio traffic, to keep German divisions tied down in Scandinavia.

Which disastrous 1942 raid on a French port taught the Allies not to attack a harbour head-on?

Dieppe cost its mostly Canadian raiders heavy losses within hours; planners concluded that seizing a defended port at the outset was no longer a priority and chose open beaches for D-Day.

Which colour named the Resistance plan to sabotage the French railways as D-Day began?

Vert (green) was one of several coded plans: Bleu struck the electricity supply and Violet cut telephone lines, while Tortue, the tortoise, set out to slow German reinforcements on the roads.

How were Resistance groups told to launch their D-Day sabotage tasks?

The BBC French service read out coded 'personal messages'; hundreds of scraps of poetry and random sentences went out nightly, so the handful that mattered, like Verlaine's 'Chanson d'automne', hid in the noise.

Germany's strategic panzer reserve in France could not move on D-Day without whose order?

Adolf Hitler kept the four divisions under his own hand as a compromise between Rommel, who wanted the tanks at the coast, and Geyr von Schweppenburg, who wanted them massed inland.

Which three US battleships bombarded the beaches as part of the Western Task Force on D-Day?

Arkansas, Nevada and Texas: Nevada, the only battleship to get under way during the attack on Pearl Harbor, had been beached, sunk, salvaged and rebuilt in time to shell the defences behind Utah Beach.

Why did the heavy bombers sent to smash Omaha Beach's defences before the landing miss them?

Low cloud cover hid the targets, and crews under orders not to hit the approaching landing craft released late; the bombs fell inland and only three landed near the beach.

Omaha Beach's sectors ran Charlie, then which 1944 phonetic-alphabet word where radio operators now say Delta?

Dog: Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy and Fox were the letters of the day, so Omaha's sectors ran from Charlie through Dog Green and Easy Red to Fox Red.

Who probably named Omaha and Utah after the hometowns of two privates fitting out his HQ?

Omar Bradley probably chose the names: the privates fitting out his First Army headquarters came from Omaha, Nebraska and Provo, Utah. The corps commanders, Gerow and Collins, were from Virginia and Louisiana.

Exercise Tiger, the April 1944 rehearsal that turned deadly, was held at which beach?

Slapton Sands in Devon was chosen for its likeness to Utah: a gravel beach, a strip of land, then a lake. Villagers nearby, some of whom had never left home, were moved out for the rehearsals.

Which German torpedo craft sank landing ships in the Exercise Tiger convoy, killing at least 749 Americans?

E-boats slipped past the convoy's thin escort on 28 April 1944 and torpedoed the slow landing ships; the losses were kept secret so as not to give away the coming invasion.

Which British newspaper's May 1944 crosswords alarmed MI5 by using D-Day code words?

The Daily Telegraph crossword's compiler, headmaster Leonard Dawe, used to call pupils in to supply words for his grids; former pupils later said the boys had picked the code words up from soldiers stationed nearby.

Paratrooper John Steele hung for two hours on D-Day after his parachute snagged on what?

Church spire: Steele played dead above the fighting until the Germans took him prisoner, then escaped; a dummy paratrooper hangs from the same church today in his memory.

Robert Capa's surviving Omaha Beach photographs from D-Day are known collectively as what?

The Magnificent Eleven: Capa said he shot 106 frames and that a London darkroom accident destroyed the rest, a story that later researchers have disputed.

Which president honoured 'the boys of Pointe du Hoc' on the clifftop?

Ronald Reagan spoke on 6 June 1984 with veterans of the climb in front of him: 'These are the men who took the cliffs,' he said, 40 years to the day after they did.

In the Mulberry harbours, what code name was given to the floating piers or roadways?

Whales were floating roadways riding on Beetle pontoons; they ran out to Spud pier heads that slid up and down on legs with the tide, so that unloading need not wait for high water.

In Operation Gambit, what marked the ends of the Anglo-Canadian beaches for the fleet?

Two midget submarines, X20 and X23, sat on the seabed from 4 June, then surfaced at 04:30 on D-Day to raise 18-foot masts with lights. The Americans declined the same service for their beaches.

The amphibious swimming Sherman tanks of D-Day were nicknamed after which cartoon character?

Donald Duck: crews took the name from the tanks' 'DD' designation; a folding canvas screen kept the Sherman afloat while propellers pushed it towards the beach.

Which capital city fell to the Allies just two days before D-Day?

Rome fell to Mark Clark's US Fifth Army on 4 June 1944; by turning for the city instead of cutting off the retreat from Monte Cassino, Clark let the German Tenth Army get away.

The 100-foot extension ladders taken to the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc on D-Day were requisitioned from where?

The London Fire Brigade's ladders rode in on four DUKW amphibious trucks, one of which German fire sank; the cliffs proved higher than the ladders could reach, and the men went up ropes instead.

How did Sergeant Leonard Lomell wreck the guns he found hidden inland from Pointe du Hoc?

With thermite grenades: while Jack Kuhn stood guard, Lomell melted the gears of the guns, which sat unguarded in an orchard, trained on Utah Beach and ready to fire.

Richard Winters of Band of Brothers fame led a 13-man assault at Brécourt Manor that is taught as a textbook attack where?

West Point has since taught it as a textbook attack on a fixed position by an outnumbered force; in one gun pit Winters also found a map marking the German batteries around Utah Beach.

Saving Private Ryan's Omaha Beach sequence was shot at Curracloe Beach in which country?

Ireland's Curracloe Beach in County Wexford was chosen for its golden sands and its likeness to the real beach; the landing was shot there in the summer of 1997.

Alongside the Sullivans, which brothers' wartime losses inspired Saving Private Ryan?

The Nilands were thought to have lost three of four sons, so the fourth was sent home from Normandy; the eldest, presumed dead, was later found alive in a Japanese prison camp in Burma.

The 1962 epic The Longest Day was adapted from a 1959 book by which author?

Cornelius Ryan built the book from more than a thousand interviews with Allied and German veterans and French civilians, then wrote the film's screenplay himself.

Which Longest Day actor had himself parachuted into Normandy on D-Day as a British officer?

Richard Todd, an officer of the 7th Parachute Battalion, reinforced the glider troops holding the captured bridges; offered the chance to play himself in the film, he took the part of the glider commander instead.

Who jumped in first to shame reluctant extras in The Longest Day's beach scene?

Robert Mitchum, playing General Norman Cota, grew disgusted when the soldiers hired as extras balked at the cold water, and jumped off the landing craft first; they followed him in.

Which operation on 15 August 1944 was the Allies' second invasion of France, on the Mediterranean coast?

Operation Dragoon landed in the south as the German front in Normandy was collapsing; its troops were taken from the armies in Italy, over the objections of the American commander there.

Which reporter stowed away in a hospital ship's bathroom to reach the Normandy beaches?

Martha Gellhorn, refused press credentials, talked her way onto the ship and locked herself in; she went ashore with its medical teams to help collect the wounded and was arrested for it afterwards.

Which code words, radioed minutes into D-Day, reported the Caen Canal and Orne bridges captured intact?

Ham and Jam: 'Ham' meant the canal bridge and 'Jam' the river bridge; engineers found both had been prepared for demolition, but the explosives had never been attached.

The Battle of Normandy ended with German armies trapped in a pocket named after which town?

Falaise: by 21 August the pocket was sealed with an estimated 50,000 Germans inside, though tens of thousands had slipped out through the gap before it closed.

A popular story says the British and Canadian beach code names were shortened from what?

Fish: Goldfish, Swordfish and Jellyfish, in the tale, with Churchill refusing to send men to die on a beach called Jelly; the story is doubted today, and 'Jelly' may never have been considered.

Which Royal Navy cruiser that shelled the Normandy coast on D-Day is now a museum ship in London?

HMS Belfast was headquarters ship of a bombardment force supporting the British and Canadian landings; she is now moored on the Thames and run by the Imperial War Museum.

The Juno Beach Centre at Courseulles-sur-Mer is built in the shape of a stylised what?

The building's five-pointed plan is a stylised maple leaf. Veteran Garth Webb drove the grassroots campaign, and more than a thousand Canadian veterans attended the opening on 6 June 2003.

Kieffer's French commandos cleared a casino strongpoint at Riva Bella in which town?

Ouistreham: the Riva Bella casino had been turned into a strongpoint; the commandos took it with help from a DD tank, while a concrete observation tower nearby held out for several more days.

The 101st Airborne Division, which parachuted into Normandy hours before the landings, goes by which nickname?

Screaming Eagles: nearly 7,000 of them jumped behind Utah Beach from 00:48 on D-Day, and bad weather and ground fire scattered them over twice the planned area.

The C-47 transports that dropped paratroopers over Normandy were known to the RAF by which name?

Dakota was the RAF's name for the C-47 Skytrain, a military version of the DC-3 airliner; on D-Day night bad weather and ground fire broke up the formations, which is why so many paratroopers landed far from their drop zones.

The Tetrarch, flown into Normandy by Hamilcar glider on D-Day, was what?

Light tank: about twenty Tetrarchs went to Normandy with the 6th Airborne, landing on the evening of D-Day; a shortage of gliders had kept them out of the invasion of Sicily the year before.

Double agent Garbo, vital to Fortitude, got an MBE from Britain and which German award?

The Iron Cross was awarded to Garbo by radio after the invasion, for reports his British handlers had helped him invent; it made Juan Pujol García one of the few people decorated by both sides.

Which 1967 film grew from a novel inspired by a 101st Airborne demolition section in Normandy?

The Dirty Dozen grew from E. M. Nathanson's 1965 novel, loosely inspired by the 'Filthy Thirteen'; ordered to secure bridges over the Douve, half the real unit were killed, wounded or captured on the jump.

Southwick House, the Allied commanders' forward headquarters for D-Day, stands just north of which naval city?

Portsmouth is about five miles south of Southwick House, where the decision to launch was taken and where the large wall maps used on D-Day still hang in the map room.

The largest Commonwealth WWII cemetery in France, with 4,648 burials, is in which town?

Bayeux War Cemetery's 4,648 graves include several hundred German soldiers; across the road, the Bayeux Memorial names more than 1,800 Commonwealth dead who have no known grave.

The 'Rupert' dummy paratroopers dropped in Operation Titanic were made mainly of what?

Burlap stuffed with straw or sand made a crude Rupert, rigged with charges that went off on landing; the lifelike dummies shown in The Longest Day were far more elaborate than the real thing.

What did Operation Pluto pump under the English Channel to supply the armies after D-Day?

Pluto carried petrol and oil: planners reckoned fuel would be over 60 per cent of supply weight. The pipe was wound on huge floating drums called Conundrums, and its pumping stations were camouflaged.

What did RAF bombers drop the night before D-Day to fake fleets on German radar?

Metal foil strips, code-named Window, were dropped at careful intervals by 617 and 218 Squadrons, so that German radar saw what looked like convoys creeping towards Cap d'Antifer and Boulogne.

Which engineering group designed and built the Atlantic Wall's major gun emplacements?

Organisation Todt, which had built the prewar Siegfried Line, drafted more than half a million French workers, yet Rommel found some stretches of the Wall only 18 per cent complete before D-Day.

Drawn from eight navies, the D-Day invasion fleet of warships, landing craft and merchant vessels numbered how many ships?

The 6,939 vessels included 1,213 warships and 4,126 landing craft, with Britain supplying 892 warships and 3,261 landing craft; the Germans had three torpedo boats and 29 fast attack craft.

Which family occasion took Field Marshal Erwin Rommel home to Germany on the eve of D-Day?

His wife's birthday: Lucie Rommel turned fifty on 6 June, and with storms forecast her husband judged a landing unlikely and drove home; he hurried back to the front the same day.

Many German commanders were away on 6 June attending war games in which city?

Rennes, in Brittany, was hosting the war games: German forecasters, short of Atlantic weather data, were predicting two weeks of storms, so commanders travelled and many men were given leave.

Which field marshal was OB West, Germany's supreme commander in the West, on D-Day?

Gerd von Rundstedt had wanted the panzers held inland while Rommel wanted them at the coast; he was dismissed in early July 1944, reportedly after telling the high command to end the war, and Günther von Kluge took over.

Which cartoonist gave $1 million to the National D-Day Memorial and led its fundraising?

Charles Schulz, the Peanuts creator and himself a wartime Army veteran, gave the money in 1997 and volunteered with his wife to head the memorial's fundraising campaign.

The 83-metre embroidery of the D-Day story stitched by the Royal School of Needlework deliberately echoes what older work?

The Bayeux Tapestry shows the Normans invading England; nine centuries on, Lord Dulverton commissioned 34 stitched panels to record the invasion that went the other way.