Word: channelling
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...Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and his fellow officers had 500,000 men stretched across 800 miles; many were middle-aged or conscripts from Eastern Europe. They would ultimately face 1 million men by July--not just Yanks and Brits but Canadian, French, Polish and Dutch troops swarming across the Channel from southern England, which had turned into a vast base163 new airfields, 2 million tons of supplies, 1,500 tanks, 5,000 boats. The Luftwaffe's 183 fighter planes that day faced 11,000 Allied aircraft...
...could the Allies rely on superior technology to win the day, though being able to listen in on coded German communications certainly helped. There was no Kevlar; there were no nightscopes, no cruise missiles or stealth fighters. Instead, Allied engineers invented artificial harbors to tow across the channel and moor once the beaches were won; sawtooth steel tusks were attached to the front of tanks to cut through the Normandy hedgerows; paratroopers used the little clickers that sound like crickets to find one another in the dark. Most of their radios and 60% of their supplies didn't survive...
...Department's original plans for attacking Nazi Germany envisioned a major cross-Channel invasion in mid-1943, with the possibility of a smaller-scale landing at an earlier date if the Soviets were on the point of collapse. That seemed perilously likely. By mid-1942, more than 150 German divisions had overrun the Soviet Union to a depth of 1,000 miles, wreaking mayhem on a scale that John F. Kennedy later compared to "the devastation of this country east of Chicago." The fate of Britain and the U.S. alike hung on the Soviets' survival. "The prize we seek," said...
...left the marshaling area with full battle equipment, about 100 lbs. per man, and went in trucks to the huge seaport of Weymouth, England. That night we boarded a liberty ship, Empire Javelin, which was to carry us across the Channel to Normandy. The harbor of Weymouth was crowded with ships of every size, shape and description, most of them flying the Stars and Stripes. We had the old battleships Arkansas, Nevada and Texas with us. On the evening of June 5, the harbor came alive. I could see one ship signaling to the other that this...
...left the Javelin on British LCAs [landing craft assault]. It was pitch black, and the Channel was rough. The huge bluish-black waves rose high over the sides of our little craft and batted the boat with unimaginable fury. [The waves] broke our front ramp, and the boat began to fill with icy Channel water. The water reached my waist, and things looked black for us as our little boat began to sink. But the lieutenant rammed his body against the inner door of the ship and said, "Well, what the hell are you waiting for? Take off your helmets...