Hist U.S. Naval Ops Vol 11 Pb: 011 (History of United States Naval Operations in World War II) Book

With this volume, Samuel Eliot Morison recounts the U.S. Navy's role in the largest and most complicated military operation ever undertaken: the invasion of Normandy. Involving more than a million American soldiers, 124,000 sailors, and 427,000 aviators, Operation Neptune-Overlord encompassed five major landings on the Norman coast. The most famous of these--the Utah and Omaha beach landings--involved the Western Naval Task Force, while the Eastern Naval Task Force covered landings at Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches. Combining meticulous detail with a forceful account of the action, Morison describes the landings themselves as well as the "dirty work in the dark" that preceded them: deceptions, diversions, commando raids, parachute drops, minesweepings, air bombing, and naval bombardment. As Morison shows, the fire curtain provided by the guns of the navy proved to be one of the most valuable trump cards of the Anglo-United States invasion armies. Morison covers the vital capture of Cherbourg as an invasion port and the diversionary landings in southern France that, together with Overlord, comprised the two main operations in the invasion of Europe in which the U.S. Navy played a leading part. At every stage, the fate of thousands of men depended not only on their own raw courage and resourcefulness but on quirks of timing and sheer luck. Morison offers a magnificent chronicle of these heroic days that definitively turned the tide of the war in Europe.Read More