: Will Fowler
: D-Day: Preparation for Overlord
: Amber Books Ltd
: 9781909160507
: 1
: CHF 3.50
:
: 20. Jahrhundert (bis 1945)
: English
: 129
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
In any military operation throughout history, few 24-hour periods have been as crucial as that of 6th June 1944. With the aid of specially commissioned maps, D-Day: The First 24 Hours series gives the dramatic history of the first 24 hours of the Normandy landings, and explains in detail the events that occurred in each landing zone. In this first volume of the series, the book describes the build-up to the landings themselves, the German preparations for defending the French coastline, and the reasons behind the final Allied decision to attack in Normandy on 6 June 1944.

With colour and black& white photographs, the book is a guide to key events in the first 24 hours of the D-Day landings that saw the Allies successfully achieve a foothold in Northern Europe.

Following the Allied landings in June 1944, many men who had been uncommitted joined the Resistance, forming groups like this one in a French courtyard. They carry a mixture of British-supplied and captured German small arms.

CHAPTER TWO


INTELLIGENCE
AND
RESISTANCE


Before the first Allied soldiers had landed in France, the war was already being fought on land. The French Resistance gathered intelligence, sustained national morale and launched attacks against German forces. Allied intelligence officers from the American OSS and British SOE assisted in these operations and would later ensure drops of weapons and explosives to remote areas. Resistance came at a price, and many men and women were executed or transported to concentration camps by the Germans.

THE ALLIES ENJOYED a unique intelligence advantage over the Germans since they had constructed copies of the German electronic encryption machine known as Enigma and broken the codes used by the German Armed Forces.

Intercepted traffic included such routine messages as unit strengths, ration and ammunition requests. With this information, the Allies were able to build up a good picture of the German Army’s order of battle on the other side of the Channel. They were also assisted by reports from the French Resistance and by USAAF and RAF reconnaissance missions which provided high- and low-level photographs of the obstacles and fortifications under construction. Low-level sorties, which were far more hazardous than the fast, high-altitude flights, produced photographs which were taken from an oblique angle that allowed seamen and soldiers to analyse coastal features and routes off designated beaches. As part of the deception plans, for every mission flown over Normandy, two were flown over the Pas de Calais. Once the invasion was launched, air reconnaissance became intense – on the night of 6–7 June, the 10th Photo Reconnaissance Group alone handled 10,000 prints.

For the German forces in Europe in early 1944, there were two simple questions to which they needed answers: where would the Allies land, and when would this happen? The Allies were not only helped by the Ultra intercepts but by the Japanese embassy in Berlin, which sent regular detailed reports about the German work on coastal defences by radio to Tokyo. Their codes had been broken and Allied intelligence teams were able to build up a very detailed picture of the Atlantic Wall, in some cases down to the location of machine gun and mortar positions. The kno