D-Day 1944 (4) Gold & Juno Beaches

The amphibious landings on the beaches codenamed Gold and Juno on 6 June 1944 were just part of the great Allied invasion of France to liberate Europe from Nazi Germany's occupation. Other landings carried out by British and American units took place under the direcdon of the Supreme Allied Commander, Gen Dwight D. Eisenhower, along the Normandy coastline both to the east and the west. The invasion was the culmination of years of planning which began soon after the Bridsh Expeditionary Force had been evacuated from the continent in 1940 in the face of overwhelming superior German forces. In the intervening years, the British, and later the Americans, had been forced to continue the war in other theatres remote from mainland Europe. In the east, the brunt of the fighting was borne by the Russians who had to resist the vast majority of Hitler's forces virtually single-handedly. Pressure was increasingly applied to the western Allies to open a second front to relieve some of the strain felt by the Russians, but a full-scale assault on a strongly held shoreline was an undertaking that required much careful planning and a considerable amount of men and equipment. It took a great deal of time before all of the infrastructure necessary for an invasion could be put in place and a landing in north-west Europe was not realistically possible until early 1944. By the time the Allies felt that they had sufficient strength to launch the invasion, Germany had been in occupation in France for four years.
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