The D-Day Secret Weapon That Defeated the Nazis

In the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, a massive armada of more than 5,000 ships and 1,200 aircraft appeared off the coast of Normandy in northern France. Moments later, some 160,000 American and British Commonwealth troops stormed onto the beaches or landed by parachute behind enemy lines. Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, had begun. The largest amphibious assault in military history, the D-Day landings, more on what D-day actually stands for in the Bonus Facts later as most people get this wrong, were an incredibly complex operation, and its planners left little to chance. Attacks were planned and rehearsed down to the smallest detail; specialized vehicles like swimming, flame-throwing, and mine-clearing tanks devised; and an elaborate deception campaign involving inflatable tanks, captured spies, and entire phantom armies mounted to fool the Germans into thinking the invasion would take place elsewhere. Yet despite all these careful preparations, Overlord may well have failed were it not for an often overlooked innovation: an ingenious portable harbour that could be assembled in days and allow hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo to be unloaded onto the beaches. Perhaps more than any ship, plane, or tank, this remarkable engineering achievement allowed the Allies to sustain the momentum of the invasion and secure a foothold – and ultimately victory – in Europe. This is the story of the Mulberry Harbour, the unsung secret weapon of D-Day. This is an abridged version of a video on our channel TodayIFoundOut which you can check out and subscribe to here:    / @todayifoundout