June 6 in History

On 6 June 1944, Allied forces landed on the coast of Normandy in German-occupied France, launching the largest amphibious invasion in history. Code-named Operation Neptune, the assault was the opening phase of Operation Overlord, the campaign to liberate Western Europe. It opened a second major front against Nazi Germany, which had been fighting the Soviet Union in the east for three years, and it marked the start of the final push toward German defeat.

The Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, code-named Operation Overlord, was as much an economic and logistical undertaking as a military one. Its cost is often put at around $100 billion in today's money, a figure that circulates widely and is best treated as a rough estimate, since the expenses of such an operation were spread across many budgets and cannot be cleanly separated from the wider war effort. What is clear is that it ranked among the largest coordinated mobilizations of industrial output, shipping and manpower ever attempted for a single operation.