D-Day, 6 June 1944

From the airborne drops to nightfall

On 6 June 1944 the Western Allies landed in Normandy: three airborne divisions in the dark, then five infantry divisions across five beaches code-named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. This timeline follows the day hour by hour, with a short lead-in on the weather gamble of 4 and 5 June and a close at nightfall. Open the map: the drops, the bridges, the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc and each beach have a place.

The first twenty-four hours of the invasion will be decisive… for the Allies, as well as Germany, it will be the longest day. — Erwin Rommel, April 1944, as his aide Hellmuth Lang recalled it to Cornelius Ryan

By the numbers

• about 156,000 Allied troops landed by sea and air

• about 7,000 ships and landing craft

• 4,436 Allied dead named by the National D-Day Memorial's Necrology Project (the long-cited figure was 4,414); more than 10,000 Allied casualties

• 4,000 to 9,000 German casualties: nobody counted, and the estimates run that wide

Reading it

Bands mark the weather decision, the crossing, the night drops, the bombardment, the morning pinned down on Omaha and the German counterattack. Filter by airborne for the paratroops and gliders, beaches for the landings, maritime for the fleet, command for the decisions at the top, germany for the other side of the hill, and news for how the world heard.

All times are UTC. Both armies kept clocks two hours ahead (British Double Summer Time and German summer time), so H-Hour on Utah and Omaha, 06:30 in every account, is 04:30 here. The notes give the clock time the sources use. H-Hour came later the farther east the beach, because the tide rose from west to east.