Normandy, northern France
Normandy 1944
The first campaign map on SprueStack. The coastline is redrawn from public-domain Natural Earth data for orientation; it is an illustrated map, not for navigation. The place names are real; unit detail and linked build guides for each marker are still being added.
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- Cherbourg
- Utah
- Omaha
- Gold
- Juno
- Sword
- Bayeux
- Caen
Campaign notes
The landings, 6 June 1944
On the morning of 6 June 1944, Allied forces landed on five beaches along this coast: Utah and Omaha to the Americans, Gold, Juno and Sword to the British and Canadians. By nightfall, around 160,000 Allied troops were ashore, with close to a million more to follow that summer.
Omaha
Omaha was the hardest fought of the five beaches. German positions on the cliffs above a long, flat shoreline caught the first waves in heavy machine-gun fire. By the time the Americans had fought their way off the beach, more than 2,400 of the roughly 34,000 men who landed there that day had been killed, wounded or gone missing, a loss rate above 7 percent.
Bayeux, the first town liberated
British troops entered Bayeux on the morning of 7 June 1944 and met little resistance. Taken too quickly to be seriously damaged, the town briefly served as the symbolic capital of Free France. General Charles de Gaulle visited on 14 June, his first time back on French soil in four years.
Cherbourg, the race for a port
Utah's landings were aimed partly at the Cotentin Peninsula and its deep-water port. No temporary Mulberry harbour could match a working port's capacity for landing supplies, so capturing Cherbourg mattered to the whole campaign. American forces reached the city on 22 June, and after a hard fight for the German positions in Fort du Roule, the city surrendered on the evening of 25 June. The retreating garrison wrecked the harbour before giving in, so it took weeks of repair before the port could be put to use.
Caen, the slow battle inland
Caen was a D-Day objective but held out far longer than planned. Operation Charnwood, backed by heavy bombing, took the northern half of the city on 8 and 9 July; the fighting for the ground beyond it, including the costly struggle for Hill 112, ran on into August. Allied forces broke out of Normandy that summer; Paris was liberated by the end of August, and German resistance in the region had collapsed by 30 August 1944.