“Invasion!”

In mil­i­tary jar­gon, D-Day can be any tar­geted day. But the one that was des­tined to be the D-Day for the rest of his­tory was June 6, 1944. That day, shortly after dawn on a cloudy and windy morn­ing, the biggest ever com­bined land, sea and air mil­i­tary op­er­a­tion was launched on the cold beaches of north­ern France, at that time under Nazi oc­cu­pa­tion. It was the most au­da­cious event in World War II and the one that would seal the war’s fate. As the com­man­der in chief of the in­va­sion, Gen­eral Dwight Eisen­hower told the thou­sands of sol­diers par­tic­i­pat­ing in it: “You will bring about the de­struc­tion of the Ger­man war ma­chine, the elim­i­na­tion of the Nazi tyranny over the op­pressed peo­ples of Eu­rope, and se­cu­rity for our­selves in a free world.” Be­fore­hand there were months of care­ful prepa­ra­tion, of de­ceiv­ing the enemy over when, where and how the in­va­sion would take place, of se­crecy, di­ver­sion of mil­i­tary ef­forts, of gath­er­ing in­for­ma­tion on the think­ing and weak­nesses of the enemy. The re­sult was such an ac­com­plish­ment that for days af­ter­wards the Ger­mans did not know whether it was the real in­va­sion or an­other cat-and-mouse ploy to di­vert their de­fend­ing forces.

First to land were the Amer­i­can sol­diers, then the British and the Cana­di­ans and other na­tion­al­i­ties, all under a thun­der­ous rain of fire. Thou­sands of lives were sac­ri­ficed. The stakes were high. After al­most five years of war, it was the de­ci­sive strug­gle. Suc­cess or fail­ure would de­cide the out­come of the war.

As soon as the al­lied forces landed on the shores of France, Eisen­hower’s head­quar­ters re­leased a sim­ple com­mu­niqué that prompted the biggest head­lines in the re­port­ing of the war, like this one in an extra edi­tion of the Los An­ge­les Times.

News­pa­per edit­ing rooms went mad. One after an­other, news­pa­pers began pub­lish­ing extra edi­tions re­port­ing on every step in the bat­tle to re-con­quer Eu­rope from Hitler’s thugs.

From then on, every piece of news was en­cour­ag­ing. The war had taken a de­ci­sive turn in favour of the al­lies

BREAK­ING NEWS Front pages through his­tory

San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle, US