SLOGGING INTO HISTORY
Landing craft and tanks at Omaha beach during the D-Day landings, many of which had departed from Penarth (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE SHEER WEIGHT OF THE NUMBERS attendant to the D-Day invasion, begun sixty-eight years ago today, beggars the imagination. And yet, faced with the even tougher task of weighing the unimaginable horror and slaughter played out on the beaches of Normandy, the ability to somehow quantify the cost in raw data is oddly comforting. It’s certainly easier than evaluating the loss to the world, in muscle and blood, of the largest military operation in recorded history. Some selected figures:
The players: one million Allies, seven hundred thousand German troops.
The hardware: 8.000 artillery pieces; 2,546 Allied bombers and 1,731 fighters, 820 German bombers and fighters; 3,500 towed gliders (100 glider pilots killed).
Lost materiel: 24 warships and 35 merchant ships sunk; 127 allied planes shot down.
The human cost of the initial invasion in gross numbers: 6,603 Americans, 2,700 British, 946 Canadians, and between 4,000 and 9.000 Germans;
And then there was the “before” killing and the “after” killing, with 12,000 airmen and 200 war planes lost in April and May 1944 in preparation for 6/4/44, and a general toll by the end of the Battle of Normandy of 425,000 Allies and Germans killed or wounded.
Today, in Normandy, spread across 77 separate cemeteries lie the remains of 77,866 Germans; 9,386 Americans; 17,769 British; 5,002 Canadians and 650 Poles.
Inside the cabin of a restored B-17, one of the workhorses of the air war over Normandy on the first wave of the D-Day Invasion. 1/125 sec., f/5, 250 ISO, 18mm.
Related articles
- ‘Band of Brothers’ honored on D-Day anniversary (newsobserver.com)
- June 6, 1944: Artificial Harbor Paves the Way for Normandy Invasion (wired.com)
