Waiting in the dunes, on the bluffs, and behind the impenetrable hedgerows were an estimated 50,000 German troops and foreign conscripts backed up by more than 600 tanks. Planted over preceding centuries to enclose the pastures, Normandy's dense bocage, or hedgerows, were lethally exploited by Germans as natural defensive lines. "It was as if the cities of Green Bay, Racine, and Kenosha, Wisconsin, were picked up and moved-every man, woman, and child, every automobile and truck-to the east side of Lake Michigan in one night," wrote historian Stephen Ambrose. Five beaches-Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword, 70 miles from end to end-were stormed by 156,000 American, British, Canadian, and French infantry in some 50,000 vehicles. More than 23,000 airborne troops landed by parachute and glider. Its eastern beaches were just another chilly, perennially damp stretch of French coastline until June 6, 1944.ĭ-Day-in French, le Jour J-opened the murderously final act of Europe's last, great war. Jutting into the Atlantic Ocean like a hitchhiker's thumb pointing toward England, Normandy is a bucolic backwater of grassy livestock pastures and cobbled-limestone villages that rolls and folds like a rumpled green bedspread across France's Cotentin Peninsula. ![]() Robinson: My WWII Ambulance Earns Its Ticket Home.Auto Industry Came to the Rescue During WWII
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