DD Tanks 3/4s of them British: 21,400 on JUNO, 24,970 on GOLD, and 28,845 on SWORD The invaders spent the next several days moving inland from five distinct beachheads, straining the individual perimeters in an effort to link them into a continuous front against rapidly stiffening German resistance The Germans launched a Panzer thrust to prevent enlargement of the beachhead It looked to reach the sea and split apart the British and Canadian left flank, a preliminary to rolling up the OMAHA and UTAH line and defeating the invasion in detail But the Panzers failed in hard fighting against the British and Canadians: Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall” was breached, the beaches were linked into a continuous front, and the Normandy campaign was underway It was an astonishing achievement of technical and organizational skill, as well as of mass production, personal and collective heroic effort, and democratic leadership in a world war Stalin himself said of the D-Day landings: “the history of war has never seen a comparable undertaking.” Western Allied air casualties included not just the 127 aircraft and crews lost on June 6, but 12,000 men and 2,000 planes lost in preparatory bombing operations from April to June The air battles included wide-ranging bombing in the heavily defended Pas de Calais prior to and after the invasion, conducted as part of a key deception operation There was also heavy bombing of French railheads, Luftwaffe air bases, and other rear area targets to disrupt German movement once the invasion began The Allies lost 59 large and mid-sized ships on D-Day, along with over 100 more damaged to some degree Best estimates of ground forces and airborne casualties suggest the British lost 2,700 men killed, wounded, or missing, while the Canadians lost another 946 men The Americans suffered 6,600 casualties, of whom just over 2,400 were killed; the rest were wounded or missing A large number of missing men later turned up alive or as German prisoners of war, most notably paratroopers from badly scattered light infantry that went in first and deepest on D-Day German casualties are not reliably known, but best estimates place them at well over 5,000 See also DD tanks; Widerstandsnest Suggested Reading: John Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy (1994); Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day: June 6, 1944 (1959) DD TANKS “Duplex Drive tank.” A Western Allied “swimming tank” adaptation in which a tank making an amphibious landing was kept afloat with an inflated and detachable apron DD tanks were used in the D-Day (June 6, 1944) landings in Normandy They had some success on the Canadian assault beach at JUNO but many floundered and sank at American landing sites on OMAHA DEAD ZONES See partisans DEATH CAMPS Major concentration camps set up by the Schutzstaffel (SS) in pursuit of “final solution” of the latter stages of the Holocaust In “regular” concentration camps many tens of thousands died, but detention rather than direct 290