D-DAY INVASION   Part One—The Preparations.        

The D in D-Day merely stands for the word, Day. This coded designation was used for the day of any important invasion or military operation. For military planners (and later historians), the days before and after a D-Day were indicated using plus and minus signs: D-4 meant four days before a D-Day, while D+7 meant seven days after a D-Day.  The invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944 was not the only D-Day of World War II. Every amphibious assault—including those in the Pacific, in North Africa, and in Sicily and Italy—had its own D-Day.

I will give you a brief introduction of what had been going on in Europe up to June 6^th 1944.

Adolph Hitler was the German Nazi dictator who beginning in 1939, had conquered most of Europe except Russia and Great Britain. He didn’t attack Switzerland, Spain or Portugal as they were neutral nations. 

Hitler later stupidly ordered his army to invade Russia on June 22^nd, 1941. Immediately after Japanese planes bombed the American war ships in Pearl Harbour the following year,  Hitler made his second stupid blunder when he declared war against the United States. This meant that Russia, the United States and Germany had the most powerful armed forces in the world. 

The last thing that a bully wants to happen to him is to have two big men attacking him from both sides of him.  With the armies of Russia moving towards Berlin from the East and the armies of the Americans moving towards Berlin from the South and the West, Hitler took on more that he could handle. 

Since Germany and Great Britain along with Canada had been at war with Germany from the beginning in 1939, Hitler would soon have to deal with the English and Canadian armed forces also who were heading in the direction of Berlin from the west.                                                                                      

By June 6^th 1944, a large contingent of the German armed forces  were still fighting the armed forces of Russia. Up until June 6.  1944, the only other forces the Germans were fighting were the bombers of the United States, Great Britain and Canada.  On the ground, the Germans controlled everything in Europe. That was soon to end. 

Once Normandy was chosen as the landing site, the immediate problem was preventing the German 15^th Army in the Pas-de-Calais from being thrown into the battle against the beachhead in Normandy.  To do that, they had to convince the Germans that the attack would be at Pas-de-Calais which was the shortest distance between England and France.

So the Allied planners sat down and concocted a story that would both divert German attention from the Normandy area and would appear to explain the Allied intentions after landing in the area of  Pas-de-Calais. The story the Germans believed was this: the Allies would land at a number of points in France and Europe but these landings would be diversions intended to draw off German strength from the main landing at Pas-de-Calais.  That buff fooled the Germans into believng that the real invasion would be at Pas-de-Calais.

Meanwhile, General Gorge Patten was pretending that he was training soldiers in the southeastern part of England. There were fake rubber tanks, jeeps  and trucks placed on fields in Southeast of England along with army barracks to give the impression that the landing would be at Pas-de-Calais. By then, the hook and anchor was hooked deep in Hitler`s mouth. The false information that he German generals accepted as fact, worked and all the German tanks in the area of Normandy were moved east to the area of Pas-de-Calais. 

When eventually became obvious to the Germans that the attack was really at Normandy, the German commanding officer at Normandy called Hitler’s headquarter to wake up Hitler because only Hitler could order the tanks at Pas-de-Calais to head directly to Normandy.

Hitler always went to bed in the early hours of the next morning so he never got out of bed until it was eleven in the morning and for this reason, he made it clear that he was not to be woken up before that time. No-one at his headquarters dared to wake him up before eleven so by the time he was awake—it was too late for the tanks to be of any help to the German forces in Normandy. By the time the tanks would have got there, the Allies would be many miles inland.

I am going to quote some exerts of what I wrote in Volume Two of my memoirs, titled Whistling in the face of Robbers with respect to the D-Day invasion beginning on page, 34. The paragraph indentations in this article are not the same as the indentations in my book. And now  my view of the invasion as written in my Memoirs.

The invasion date was originally scheduled for June 5^th. One man alone convinced General Eisenhower to cancel the June 5^th date of the invasion. He was Flight Lieutenant, Bob Dale, a Canadian pilot and navigator. He was called into the office of Air Vice Marshal Don Bennett. The Vice Marshall told Dale that he wanted him and his co-pilot, Nigel Bicknell to undertake one of the most critical air operations of the war. General Eisenhower (the supreme head of the Allied Forces) wanted to know what the weather would be like in Northern France and the English Channel on June 5^th. The route he and his co-pilot was to take on June 4^th would cover the area from the North Sea (what was then called, Holland and is now called the Netherlands) and west across the northern shores of France and south to Brest, France and finally back across the English Channel to England. It was roughly a 1,000 mile (1,609 km) trip in which they would fly 20,000 feet (6,096 metres) above the ground. 

He was to give a complete report of the weather as it was at various stages of the flight. The planners of the invasion knew that in order to permit air operations and naval bombardments, the winds had to be heading in the right direction and at an appropriate velocity and equally important, the sky had to be clear. Three hours later, they landed back in England and he was then plugged into a line in which the recipient at the Allied Command in London would get his report. The weather over the northern coast of France was really bad. As a result of his report, General Eisenhower decided to wait for the weather to clear up. It did and the prognosis was that the weather would be favourable the next day—June 6^th.       

Although the weather was fine during most of May, it deteriorated in early June. On the 4^th of June, conditions were clearly unsuitable for a landing; wind and high seas would make it impossible to launch landing craft from larger ships at sea, low clouds would prevent aircraft finding their targets.

The Allied troop convoys already at sea were forced to take shelter in bays and inlets on the south coast of Britain for the night. And since Dales report stated that the weather was also bad on the 5^th, again the invasion was prosponed. Unquote                                                                                                                        

I can’t begin to tell you just how complicated the planning for history’s largest naval invasion was so I will give you some facts to ponder as I wrote them in my Memoirs.

There were several leaks prior to or on D-Day. One such leak was the crossword puzzle that came out in The Herald and Review six days before the beach landings were to take place. Some of the answers consisted of Overlord, Neptune, Gold and other key terms used for the invasions. The US government later declared that this was just a coincidence. Also an officer who was involved with the planning took some documents home with him to study and discovered to his horror that he had taken the plans home for Operation Overlord, which was the name of the invasion. He returned them the next morning and it was decided that he would be sent to an army camp in Scotland so that German spies wouldn’t capture him and he would remain in that camp until after the invasion began and then he would be returned to his office in London. The Germans actually had obtained documents containing references to Overlord, but these documents lacked all major details, especially the date of the invasion.


In the summer of 1943 an early copy of the plans blew out of a window in Norfolk House, London. A man who was passing by handed them in, saying his sight was too bad to read them. 

The Naval Task Forces totaled 672 warships which included convoy escort, minesweeping, shore bombardment, and 4,126 major and minor landing ships and craft for initial assault and ferry purposes which amounted to a grand total of 4,798 ships and smaller boats.

The invasion was originally set for June 5^th but strong storms forced General Eisenhower to postpone the invasion for 24 hours. Without a break in the weather, D-Day would have to be put off two weeks until tides and moon were right again. Allied meteorologists nevertheless predicted that break, small though it was, for June 6^th. Eisenhower then launched the invasion with a simple: "OK, we'll go." 

At that precise moment, I was living in a small mining town in British Columbia, Canada as an eleven -year old boy. Our town was surrounded by the Caribou Mountains so radio reception wasn’t always available to us thus, we didn’t learn of the invasion until twelve hours later in the following morning.

In Part Two, I will describe the actual Invasion.