The Normandy landingsThe Allied landing in Normandy on 6 June 1944 was among the most desperate undertakings in the history of war. Amphibious operations against an enemy in a strong defensive position will almost always lead to heavy casualties. By November 1943, the capture of the small atoll of Tarawa in the central Pacific by the United States Marine Corps had cost more than 3,000 casualties. American censors banned the public screening of the US Navy film about this event, claiming that the shocking images of a red lagoon of soldiers' blood would undermine the morale of American forces and the home front. The British and Canadians had suffered their own disaster at Dieppe on 18 August. 1942. More than two-thirds of a raiding force of 6,000 men had been left on the shingle beach, dead, wounded and prisoners. On the eve of D-Day the Allied leadership was in a state of neurotic anxiety. Shortly after midnight on 6 June, a restless Churchill, haunted by the memory of the disastrous Allied landing at Gallipoli 29 years earlier, wished his wife goodnight with the words: "Do you realize that when you wake up in the morning twenty thousand men might have been killed?" ?' That same night, the Imperial Chief of Staff, General Alan Brooke, confided in his diary that '...it may be the most horrible disaster of the whole war. I wish to God it would end safe and sound.' At around 10pm the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, paid an impromptu visit to the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne at Greenham Common airfield, near Newbury. His driver, Kay Summersby, recorded that the general, overcome with emotion, went up...... middle of paper......l Erwin Rommel, all the beaches on which a landing was considered possible had been festooned with obstacle belts and minefields, and covered by machine gun and mortar emplacements. Further back, bunkers of enormous strength at Merville, Longues and Pointe du Hoc on the Normandy coast allowed large-caliber German guns to bombard a landing force. To frustrate an air attack, German engineers flooded low-lying areas and strung cables across fields to discourage glider landings. The Americans had come to Europe to end the war as quickly as possible, and that meant taking the shortest and most direct route to Germany. However, the Dieppe disaster and their experiences in the Pacific had dampened their optimism. Thus the Normandy landings would become the most highly planned operation in military history.