It is 74 years ago today that Allied troops stormed the Normandy coast, kicking off the liberation of Nazi-dominated Western Europe.
Like many major historical events, D-Day has generally been boiled down into only a handful of iconic images. For instance, you’ve probably seen this one today, a famed image of U.S. soldiers wading ashore at Omaha Beach.
Below, the National Post has compiled a gallery of lesser-seen images from that day.
Most D-Day photographs do not show soldier’s faces. They’re either shot from behind, or they’re shot from such a distance that individual features cannot be ascertained. And if men’s faces are shown, they’re usually smiling, looking brave or otherwise posing for an army photographer. This image is unique in that it appears to be candid. These are Canadian troops from Quebec City’s Le Régiment de la Chaudière, meaning they are among the few D-Day troops that day who spoke the language of the country they were liberating.
This photo, held by Library and Archives Canada, shows Canadian landing craft ferrying troops towards Juno Beach. It highlights an easily forgotten fact about D-Day: June 6, 1944 was a pretty nice day. Despite some cloud, the temperature was a cool but comfortable 15 degrees Celsius. Black and white images have a tendency to show D-Day as being shrouded with portent and menace, but the men there experienced it in full colour.
D-Day is most closely associated with the Higgins Craft, the small, shallow-bottomed landing craft used in the initial assaults. This photo shows a couple of “Landing Craft, Infantry (Large)” used by the Canadians; larger vessels that were used to flood Normandy with men and equipment once the beachheads were secure. This image also shows what D-Day generally looked like to the navy: Clouds of smoke, the distant rattle of machine gun fire and vague shapes moving around on the sands. Even for troops entering some of the deadliest zones of fighting that day, they often wouldn’t fully grasp the danger of their situation until they were mere seconds from the beach.
These are three British sergeants queuing up to disembark from HMCS Prince David, a Canadian troop transport that had started life as the 1930s equivalent of a B.C. Ferry. One thing remembered vividly by many D-Day veterans was the awful anticipation. For years, units from all over the world had been in England, training for the promised “invasion.”
The YouTube video above, uploaded by Legion Magazine, gives a rare soldier’s perspective of the opening assault. These are soldiers from New Brunswick being unloaded at Juno Beach. While some landing craft would be met with immediate machine gun fire as soon as the bow ramp dropped, later waves would not begin to take fire until further inland. At the one-minute mark, note the soldier who taps his companion on the back for encouragement.
This is an aerial image, taken during the fighting, of Omaha Beach, the American landing beach most famously depicted in the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan. More than 2,000 men were killed at the beach, many of them to only a single German machine gunner. This photo gives some sense of the magnitude of the cost: Many of the small black dots seen on the sand are dead U.S. soldiers. If this image was not black and white, it would indeed depict ocean waters stained blood red.
And here is a much more detailed image of a U.S. invasion beach, possibly Utah or Omaha. Although Utah would be relatively easy to capture, even a relatively smooth operation in the Second World War could result in a landscape choked with death.
This is Omaha Beach only eight hours after the initial horrific U.S. assaults. The beach would see its first official memorial service by June 10, but in the initial scramble of D-Day Omaha’s carnage would simply need to be pushed aside as more tanks, more men and more equipment were rushed to the site in anticipation of a German counterattack. Within days, these beaches would look like impromptu ports, with literal traffic jams of vessels, trucks and armoured equipment.
This is what an invasion fleet of 5,000 ships looks like. It’s an Allied radar image of the English Channel on the morning of June 6, 1944, showing a swarm of craft making a beeline for Normandy. Fortunately for history, Nazi Germany would take several days to appreciate that the assault on Normandy was the “real” invasion. In a decision they would come to regret, many German commanders spent the first hours believing that the Normandy landings were simply an elaborate feint.
This is a 1930s image of Vierville-Sur-Mer, the French beach town just above what would become Omaha Beach. It illustrates that Allied soldiers were being slaughtered on beaches that, a mere five years ago, had been French holiday destinations. They’re pleasure beaches once again. While the Normandy coast is littered with solemn memorials to June 6, 1944, D-Day pilgrims are occasionally surprised to see French families sun-tanning and building sand castles on the precise places where more than 4,000 soldiers were killed.