‘O Lord, Give Us Faith’: The 78th Anniversary of D-Day and FDR’s Prayer Broadcast to the Nation by Steve Warren for CBN News
Monday, June 6, marks the 78-year anniversary of D-Day, the day of the greatest military invasion in modern history.
Codenamed “Operation Overlord,” D-Day (June 6, 1944) began at 6:30 am when an Allied force of 156,000 troops made up of primarily Americans, Britons, and Canadians landed on five beaches stretching 50 miles along a heavily fortified coast in Normandy, France. French, Australian, Belgian, Czech, Dutch, Greek, New Zealander, Norwegian, Rhodesian, and Polish soldiers also participated.
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The sands of those five beaches codenamed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword would soon be red with blood as the German machine gunners, infantry and light artillery attempted to defend Adolf Hitler’s “Sea Wall.”
On most of the beaches, the Allied assault went pretty much as planned. However, at Omaha Beach, units of the American 1st Infantry Division faced stiff resistance from German infantry units dug in in the heights above them.
German Preparations
Hitler had instructed Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, his one-time Afrika Corps commander, to prepare for an invasion in the fall of 1943. Rommel pushed his men to build fortifications and bunkers, set up barbed wire, dig trenches and place obstacles on the beach at low and high tide levels.
