The fascinating D-Day facts you never knew

June 6th 2014 marks the 70th anniversary since D-Day when Allied forces landed on Normandy’s beaches.

17:47 05 June 2014

It's been 70 years since D-Day, when allied forces pushed Hitler’s army back to Germany. In this article, we reveal some of the great facts that you may not know about one of the Allies' finest hours: 

 

1.Dwight D Eisenhower was made supreme commander when Operation Overlord started in 1943 while British general Bernard Montgomery took charge of the ground troops. 

 

2.Prior to the actual invasion, there were about 3,200 reconnaissance missions that were launched to take photos of vital locations. 

 

3.Early copies of the Operation Overlord plans were blown out of a window in the summer of 1943. They were handed back by a man whose sight was too bad to read them. 

 

4.Instead of Pas-de-Calais, troops chose beach landings in Normandy as this would mean fewer rivers and canals to cross. 

 

5.There were to be five landing zones along 50-mile stretch of coast. The British would attach at Gold and Sword, the Americans at Utah and Omana, and the Canadian troops at Juno. 

 

6.D-Day was supposed to happen on June 5 but was moved a day after due to bad weather. 

 

7.The “D” in D-Day did not stand for anything other than 'day' and it was used to preserve secrecy. 

 

8.There were 946 American servicemen that were killed on April 28, 1944 when a German boat sank a convoy of ships involved in a D-Day dress rehearsal. 

 

9.With the aim to deceive Germans into thinking that invasion will take place at Calais, numerous dummy camps, planes, and tanks were constructed in Essex and Kent. 

 

10.The Germans were given wrong information by a Spanish-born double agent who was successful in getting them to believe that the Normandy landings were just a ruse. 

 

11.Crucial codewords for the D-Day made their way in Daily Telegraph crosswords in May 1944. 

 

12.Hitler’s Atlantic wall was built all along the coast using 100,000 workers. 

 

13.High Command issued 30,000 stretchers and 60,000 blankets after they thought that successful landings would result in 10,000 dead and 30,000 wounded. 

 

14.Terence Otway tested his security among his men by sending 30 members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force to local pubs to see if any of his men would divulge top secret information – nobody did. 

 

15.The night before the landings, Prime Minister Winston Churchill told his wife: “Do you realise that by the time you wake up in the morning 20,000 men may have been killed?” 

 

16.Lt “Den” Brotheridge was the first British casualty on D-Day. He was shot in the neck after he landed in France at 00.16am. 

 

17.Several paratroopers landed on the wrong place including US Private John Steele who was taken as a prisoner after his parachute became snagged on the church steeple for two hours. 

 

18.Seven million pounds of bombs were dropped that day and there were 1,900 Allied bombers who attacked the German lines. 

 

19.When the invasion arrived, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was asleep and no one dared to wake him up. 

 

20.There were 4,572 total Allied casualties while the Germans lost about 9,000.