jun 6, 1944 - D-day: allies landing in France

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June 6, 1944, the date of the Allied invasion of northern France. The largest amphibious assault in world history, the invasion opened a second front against the Germans and moved the Allies closer to victory in Europe.


The long-promised invasion of France finally came on D-Day, June 6, 1944. That morning, the largest armada ever assembled moved across the English Channel under the command of General Eisenhower. American, British, and Canadian soldiers suffered terrible casualties storming the beaches of Normandy, but their bravery secured a foothold on Hitler’s “Fortress Europe.” Over the next few weeks, more than 1.5 million soldiers and countless tons of military supplies and equipment flowed into France. Much to the Allies’ advantage, they never faced more than one-third of the Wehrmacht, thanks to Soviet pressure on the Eastern Front. In August, Allied troops liberated Paris; by September, they had driven the Germans out of most of France and Belgium. Well in advance of D-Day, Allied bombers had been pummeling military and industrial targets in the German homeland. Incendiary raids on cities such as Hamburg and Dresden destroyed vital military targets, but the resulting firestorms also killed many thousands of civilians. The human cost of the Allied bombing campaign was an estimated 305,000 civilian and military deaths, and another 780,000 injured — a grisly reminder of the war’s brutality.

These U.S. soldiers were among the 156,000 Allied troops who stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944: on that day alone, more than 10,000 were killed or wounded. Within a month, 1 million Allied troops had come ashore. Most Americans learned of the invasion at 3:30 a.m. Eastern Time, when Edward R. Murrow, the well-known radio journalist whose reports from war-torn London had gripped the nation in 1940, read General Eisenhower’s statement to the troops. “The eyes of the world are upon you,” Eisenhower told the men as they prepared to invade the European mainland.

The Germans were not yet defeated, however. In December 1944, they mounted a final desperate offensive in Belgium, the so-called Battle of the Bulge. The push came close to a major success and saw some of the fiercest fighting of the war. But by the new year, the exhausted German forces were stopped. Soon the Allied advance would push them across the Rhine River into Germany itself. With American and British troops driving from the west, Soviet troops advanced east through Poland. On April 30, 1945, as Russian troops massed outside Berlin, Hitler committed suicide. On May 7, Germany formally surrendered.

As Allied troops advanced into Poland and Germany in the spring of 1945, they came face-to-face with Hitler’s “final solution” for the Jewish population of Germany and the German-occupied countries: the extermination camps in which 6 million Jews had been put to death, along with another 5 to 6 million Poles, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other “undesirables.” Indelible images of the Nazi death camps at Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz, and elsewhere showed bodies stacked like cordwood and survivors so emaciated that they were barely alive. Published in Life and other mass-circulation magazines, the photographs of the Holocaust horrified the American public and the world.

Holocaust: Germany’s campaign during World War II to exterminate all Jews living in German-controlled lands, along with other groups the Nazis deemed “undesirable.” In all, some 11 to 12 million people were killed in the Holocaust, most of them Jews.


Starved and nearly dead prisoners in the Ebensee concentration camp in Austria, when it was liberated by the U.S. Army in May 1945. Ebensee was a slave labor camp whose prisoners dug vast tunnels for storing German munitions. One-third of the prisoners were near starvation at any given time, and more than 10,000 died. As horrific as life in Ebensee was, far worse were the Nazi extermination camps, such as Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek, Dachau, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, where more than three million people, the vast majority of them Jews, were murdered.


The Nazi persecution of German Jews in the 1930s was not a secret. The United States had condemned the repression but also refused to relax its strict immigration laws to take in Jewish refugees. In one notable instance, the SS St. Louis, a German ocean liner carrying nearly a thousand Jewish refugees, sought permission from President Roosevelt to dock at an American port in 1939. Permission was denied, and the ship was forced to return to Europe. Many of the passengers on the St. Louis died in Nazi extermination camps. The tight controls on immigration continued even as more and more of Europe’s Jewish population fell under Hitler’s control.

EXAM TIP
Evaluate the impact of discovery of the Holocaust on American’s views of the war as a fight to protect freedom and democracy.

Various factors inhibited attempts to relax immigration barriers, but the largest was widespread anti-Semitism: in the State Department, Christian churches, and the public at large. The legacy of the immigration restriction laws of the 1920s and the isolationist attitudes of the 1930s also discouraged policymakers from embracing refugees. Taking a narrow view of the national interest, the State Department allowed only 21,000 Jewish refugees to enter the United States during the war. But the War Refugee Board, which President Roosevelt established in 1944 at the behest of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau did help move 200,000 European Jews to safe havens in other countries.


Defeating Japan proved just as arduous as the campaign against the Third Reich. After crippling much of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese pushed out into East Asia and the wider Pacific. British colonial possessions such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma (Myanmar), and Malaya (Malaysia) rapidly fell to the Japanese, as did the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). Imperial Japanese forces also seized smaller, strategically vital territories such as Wake Island, Guam, and the Solomon Islands. Their advance even threatened Australia, whose military forces were largely deployed on the other side of the globe. By May 1942, Japan forced the surrender of U.S. troops in the Philippine Islands.

At that dire moment, American naval forces scored two crucial victories. The raid on Pearl Harbor had destroyed or disabled many American battleships and cruisers, but the Pacific fleet’s aircraft carriers had been away from port and were not damaged. In the Battle of the Coral Sea, off southern New Guinea in May 1942, they halted the Japanese offensive against Australia. In June, at the Battle of Midway Island, the U.S. Navy smashed the Japanese fleet and changed the course of the war. In both battles, planes launched from American aircraft carriers provided the margin of victory.

The U.S. military command in the Pacific, headed by General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, then took the offensive. Following their victory at the Battle of Midway in June 1942, and extending through the summer of 1945, American forces advanced slowly toward Japan, taking one island after another in the face of determined resistance. In October 1944, MacArthur and Nimitz began the reconquest of the Philippines with a victory at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, a massive encounter in which nearly the entire Japanese navy was destroyed


After the attacks on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Japanese rapidly extended their domination in the Pacific. The Japanese flag soon flew as far east as the Marshall and Gilbert islands and as far south as the Solomon Islands and parts of New Guinea. Japan also controlled the Philippines, much of Southeast Asia, and parts of China, including Hong Kong. By mid-1942, American naval victories at the Coral Sea and Midway stopped further Japanese expansion. Allied forces retook the islands of the central Pacific in 1943 and 1944 and ousted the Japanese from the Philippines early in 1945. Carrier-launched planes had started bombing Japan itself in 1942, but the capture of these islands gave U.S. bombers more bases from which to strike Japanese targets. As the Soviet army invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria in August 1945, U.S. planes took off from one of the newly captured Mariana Islands to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese offered to surrender on August 10.


Areas under Japanese control in 1942 include Manchuria, Korea, Thailand, French Indochina, Burma, Taiwan, Malaya, Sumatra, Borneo, New Guinea, the Philippines, parts of China (including Beijing and Hong Kong), and various islands around Japan. Allied powers on the map include the Soviet Union, China, India, Mongolia, Australia, Alaska, and Hawaii. Allied response followed two routes from the south in 1942 and 1943 toward the Philippines and Japan via the Solomon Island, Gilbert Island, New Guinea, and Mariana Islands. A route from Alaska headed toward the northern part of Japan in 1943. Routes from the Soviet Union led to Manchuria and Korea in 1945. The map also shows major battles at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941; Midway, June 3 to 6, 1942; Guadalcanal, August 7, 1942, to February 7, 1943; Coral Sea, May 7 to 8, 1942; Tarawa, November 20, 1943; Leyte Gulf, October 20 to 26, 1944; the Philippine Sea, June 19 to 20, 1944; Bataan, January to April 1942; Singapore falls to the Japanese, February 15, 1942; Iwo Jima, February 19 to March 16, 1945; and Okinawa, April 1 to June 22, 1945. Atomic bombs were dropped in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

By early 1945, victory in the Pacific was in sight. Japanese military forces had suffered devastating losses, and American bombing of the Japanese homeland had crippled the nation’s industrial production, in addition to killing between 300,000 and 900,000 civilians. The human cost was horrendous, just as it was in Europe — two million Japanese soldiers were killed in the war alongside as many as three million Japanese civilians (American military deaths in the Pacific numbered fewer than 150,000). Desperate to halt the American advance and short on ammunition, Japanese pilots began to fly suicidal kamikaze missions, crashing bomb-laden planes into American ships.

The war in the Pacific was marked by vicious racial overtones. Dehumanizing logic was not limited to only one side. Japan’s brutal attacks on China, its exploitation of Korean “comfort women,” who were forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers, and its brutal treatment of American prisoners in the Philippines flowed from a sense of racial superiority among the Japanese. At the same time, the attack on Pearl Harbor reawakened a long tradition of anti-Asian sentiment in the United States. In the eyes of many Americans, the Japanese were “yellow monkeys,” an inferior race whose humanity deserved minimal respect. Anti-Japanese attitudes in the United States would ebb in the 1950s, as the former enemy became a trusted ally. But in the 1960s, anti-Asian racial ideology would reemerge to play a major role in the U.S. war in Vietnam.

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