Operation Overlord Research Paper

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Throughout the war the allied powers had tried different approaches at the initial landings on foreign soils, they have been pushed by rail, by air, by sea, and by parachute. Not one had been one hundred percent successful, prior to Operation Husky, the allied powers decided during the Casablanca planning conference that the primary invasion tool would be an amphibious landing with additional paratrooper forces pushed inland the night before, with hopes of knocking out axis pill boxes and defense batteries . The paratroopers dropped during the night of July 9th and into the early morning of the 10th, with the bad weather of winds and rains, the paratrooper invasion was not going to be a big success with the push inland from the beaches . …show more content…
Planning began well in advance of the June 6th, 1944 landing; the allied commanders used the largest amphibious offensive up to now for an example of the good and bad. The 3,300 ships that where used for the landing in Sicily set the stage on how many troops and what supplies could be moved ashore by each landing craft. To invade the number of sites for D-Day meant that the allied forces needed a few thousand more transport boats, or now known as Higgins boats to move the troops and initial push ashore. The planning became difficult with funding and material shortages, the allied powers contracted numerous companies to build and supply them with enough materials for the mid summer invasion. The allied Commanders learned from Operation Husky that they didn’t have to push all the supplies and materials to the beachhead once it had been secured; instead like in Sicily they built floating causeways and artificial harbor also known as a Mulberries, the British built two off the coast or Normandy to offload all the supply ships . One of the biggest changes to make from the invasion of Sicily was the paratrooper drop behind enemy lines, no matter how many times they planned the drops in all battles up to this point they always ended off of their targets. The easiest way to put all the plans together of the amphibious landing and the paratrooper drop was to have them go flawlessly and hit their intended targets, however that is when “Murphy’s law” always strikes and plans go astray. For the D-Day invasion they tried to zero in on the paratrooper targets at closer range for the initial drop hoping they could turn back towards the beach and hit the German defense from the rear, however as in all airdrops of paratroopers during WWII the plans didn’t work out as planned

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