Preparation for the Normandy Landings
After the United States entered the war in December 1941, the Allies began preparing for their military action against the Reich. While British Prime Minister Winston Churchill advocated an assault in the Mediterranean, the Americans opted for an attack on the Channel coast, followed by a major operation in early 1942. The failure of the Anglo-Canadian Dieppe Raid in August 1942 quickly put an end to these plans. It was still too early, and Operation Torch, the landing in North Africa, had become a priority.
The idea of a second open front in the West, which Joseph Stalin had been demanding from his allies for many months, resurfaced in May 1943. Under the code name Overlord, the operation was scheduled for May 1944. The section in France between the Orne estuary and Cherbourg was then chosen to create a bridgehead on the western coast of Europe.
The choice of Normandy
From May 1943, the Supreme Allied Command had to precisely determine the landing site on the endless seafront between the North Cape and the Spanish border. The required criteria were clearly defined: the presence of a major port near the assault beaches, the existence of low-lying beaches, a hinterland suitable for the deployment of armored forces, and the proximity of British airfields.
Of the two chosen sectors, Lower Normandy and Pas-de-Calais, the latter is the closest but the best defended. In Normandy, a more distant region, the Atlantic Wall built by the Germans is less imposing, and above all, unfinished. The Normandy beaches, well sheltered from the strong winds, are not far from the port of Cherbourg. Finally, this region is easily isolated from the rest of France, by cutting all the bridges on the Seine and the Loire one by one. These sectors had already been explored by British commando raids in 1941 and 1942. After the operation carried out on Dieppe, a vast anticipation of the D-Day landings but a real failure, the raids would be resumed on these Channel coasts.
Operation Fortitude
Before gaining a foothold on the French coast, the Allies devised vast deception campaigns grouped under the name of Fortitude and intended to convince the Germans of a landing in the Pas-de-Calais. Allied intelligence services then flooded the Germans with false information on the location, but also on the date of the landing. Real armies but cardboard logistics were deployed in the southeast of England in the Kent region: phantom airfields, a fictitious oil complex built near Dover, inflatable vehicles, wooden planes lined up in fields and along roads… Observation and bombing missions were carried out regularly in the north and northeast of France.
A staff for a fictitious high command exercised by General Patton is even installed for the occasion, the FUSAG, the First United States Army Group. Fake headquarters, fake infrastructure, fake equipment parks, but also fake radio links with Montgomery and a large number of coded messages sent over the airwaves. In May 1944, Field Marshal von Rundstedt remained convinced that the landing would take place north of the Seine. The deception worked so well that the Germans long believed that a second landing would take place in the Calais region in July, with an army twice as large as those they would discover on June 6, 1944.
