Normandy landings

6 June 1944, Bay of the Seine, Normandy

Allied victory; the armies ashore on all five beaches

Operation Neptune, the naval part of the invasion of Normandy, was the largest seaborne landing in history: nearly 7,000 ships and craft, some 1,200 of them warships, carried and covered five divisions onto five beaches on the morning of 6 June 1944. Minesweepers cleared ten channels through the German minefields in the night, and at dawn the battleships, cruisers and destroyers of the bombarding forces opened fire on the coastal batteries and the beach defences. Every Allied navy in the war against Germany was there. The French cruisers Montcalm and Georges Leygues, which had fought the Allies at Dakar in 1940, fired on their own country off Omaha; Polish, Norwegian and British destroyers and the Polish cruiser Dragon supported the British landing at Sword; the Canadian destroyers Algonquin and Sioux, and the Free French La Combattante, supported the Canadians at Juno, and the Dutch gunboats Soemba and Flores joined the bombardment. The only sortie by German warships came at first light, when three torpedo boats from Le Havre fired a spread of torpedoes at the ships off Sword: they missed Warspite and Ramillies, but hit the Norwegian destroyer Svenner, which broke in two and sank. In the days that followed, old ships, among them the French battleship Courbet and the Dutch cruiser Sumatra, were scuttled to make breakwaters for the Mulberry harbours.