In the early hours of 5 June 1944, after bad weather had already forced a day's postponement, General Dwight D. Eisenhower gave the final order to invade Normandy the next morning. That evening he visited American paratroopers before they boarded their aircraft, and from England the airborne armies took off: the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions for the Cotentin Peninsula, and the British 6th Airborne Division, in an operation codenamed Tonga, for the eastern flank near Caen. Just after midnight, British gliders landed beside the bridges over the Caen Canal and the Orne.
Waiting for the weather
The tides and moonlight the planners needed occurred only a few days a month, and in June 1944 the possible dates were the 5th, 6th and 7th, as Tim Rives of the Eisenhower Presidential Library explains. When the chief meteorologist, Group Captain J. M. Stagg, forecast cloud and high winds for 5 June, Eisenhower postponed the invasion by a day. On the evening of 4 June, Stagg predicted a break of about 36 hours of better weather.1
At a meeting in Southwick House near Portsmouth early on 5 June, Montgomery, Ramsay and Leigh-Mallory each said go, and Eisenhower gave the order. What he actually said is uncertain: witnesses recorded "Well, we'll go!", "OK, boys. We will go" and other versions, and even the time of the meeting is given as 4:00, 4:15 or 4:30 a.m.. Before the landings Eisenhower also wrote a short note to be used if the landings failed, taking the blame himself; he misdated it "July 5".2 › Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Full victory, nothing else"
On the evening of 5 June Eisenhower went to see paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division as they prepared to board their planes; Army photographers recorded the visit. From that evening the airborne divisions began loading. The Airborne Assault Museum gives about 13,000 men of the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions and 7,000 British airborne troops, carried by up to 1,500 aircraft, with pathfinders of the British 22nd Independent Parachute Company marking the British drop zones. The US Army's account counts more than 13,000 paratroopers in about 925 C-47 transports, with glider troops to follow.3
Their task was to seize or destroy bridges and road crossings and to guard the flanks of the beaches where the seaborne divisions would land at dawn. The Americans would drop behind Utah Beach on the Cotentin Peninsula, and the British east of the Orne, near Caen.4
The bridges at midnight
According to the Imperial War Museums, a force of 181 men under Major John Howard took off on the night of 5 June from RAF Tarrant Rushton in Dorset in six Horsa gliders towed by Halifax bombers. They landed shortly after midnight beside the bridges over the Caen Canal and the Orne, took the defenders by surprise and captured the canal bridge, later known as Pegasus Bridge, after about ten minutes of fighting. The Airborne Assault Museum calls this coup de main completely successful. Lieutenant Den Brotheridge, shot while leading the first platoon across the canal bridge, is recorded by the Imperial War Museums as the first British soldier of the invasion killed by enemy fire.5
Elsewhere the drops went badly. High winds and German flak scattered the paratroopers, and both the US Army and the Airborne Assault Museum describe units landing far from their targets with many men killed or injured and much equipment lost. The museum records that only about 40 percent of the 6th Airborne Division could form up for its first tasks, and that Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway attacked the Merville Battery with 150 of the 600 men he needed, losing half of them. Even so, the bridges over the Dives were blown on time and the eastern flank was held. The story of the landings that followed at dawn is told in D-Day, 1944: the longest day on the Normandy beaches.6
Also on this day
- 1602: Siege of Dunboy. In the Nine Years' War in Ireland, Sir George Carew's English army besieged Dunboy Castle on the Beara peninsula, whose small garrison served the Gaelic lord Donal Cam O'Sullivan Beare.
