14 Facts About D-Day Most People Don't Know

By mid-1944, Adolf Hitler's doctor was treating him with medications that included amphetamines and possibly even cocaine. Consequently, Hitler would remain awake into the wee early morning hours and sleep until the early afternoon. The most superior members of the German high command were aware of his sleeping patterns. They knew that he had a tendency to lash out and would become upset if awoken due to a decoy attack, which is why they decided to wait until he awoke and they were sure that the attack was real.  

Hitler had also forbidden commanders in the field from adjusting troop positions without his specific permission. When several generals in the Normandy area wanted to immediately deploy two German panzer divisions to attack the tenuous Allied toehold as quickly as possible, they had to wait until late morning before disturbing him. By that time, the clouds preventing Allied air attacks had broken, and German reinforcements could only proceed by night, greatly reducing their ability to counterattack and ensuring the success of the landing.

Because D-Day relied so heavily on issues surrounding weather, tides, cloud cover, and moonlight, only certain days could be considered for the invasion. Initially, Allied meteorologists selected June 5, 1944, as the most advantageous day for the attack. However, rough seas, high waves, and extreme cloud cover could have been enough on their own to ensure the failure of the operation. On June 4, British military meteorologist James Stagg sided with his staff and recommended a postponement of the invasion until June 6. He believed that an invasion on June 5 would be a disaster. In 1944, none of the weather satellites or technology that exist today were available, only anecdotal evidence gathered from various vantage points in the British Isles and the Atlantic. 

The ultimate decision was made by General Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces. He gambled on postponing the invasion until June 6 and hoped that Stagg was correct. While June 6 was not perfect, the invasion was able to proceed, and a window of slightly better weather prevented the climate from being a factor in the invasion.

Unfortunately for the Germans, their chief Luftwaffe meteorologist did not have access to Stagg's wealth of information, and his forecast was for persistently bad weather that would prevent an invasion for at least several weeks. The German high command operated under this notion, one of the reasons that they were caught off-guard when the D-Day began. 

One of the individuals who might have played a major role in successfully repelling the Allied invasion was Field Marshall Erwin Rommel. A brilliant tactician nicknamed "The Desert Fox" for his exploits during the Axis campaign in North Africa, Rommel was reassigned to supervise the defense of the "Atlantic Wall," the defense system implemented by Germany to defend against any incursion. Rommel had spent most of the previous five years away from his wife and son and wanted to briefly return home to celebrate his wife's 50th birthday.

When his staff, based on optimistically incorrect weather reports, assured him that the Allies couldn't possibly land anywhere on the French coast, he took the opportunity to return to Germany. Other senior officers were ordered to participate in a war game exercise that also took them away from the immediate field of battle. 

Informed of the attack in the early morning of June 6, Rommel rushed back to the front and managed to arrive that evening. By then, the Allies had secured the beachhead at Normandy, and Rommel was powerless to stop the invasion.   

In May 1944, a member of Britain's intelligence service, MI5, was observant enough to spot the answer "Utah" in a crossword puzzle in a large-circulation London newspaper, The Daily Telegraph. Initially dismissed as a coincidence, agents were stunned when, within several weeks and only days before D-day, the words Omaha, Overlord, Mulberry, and Neptune all appeared as answers in the same Daily Telegraph crossword. All of these names were secret words closely associated with the impending operation. Security services quickly hauled in the composer of the crossword puzzles, Leonard Dawe, who turned out to be a headmaster at a local private school, the Strand School. Despite an intense interrogation that Dawe refused to describe until decades later, MI5 was eventually satisfied that he was not an enemy agent.

But the mystery of how the words wound up in the puzzles remained. In 1984, one of Dawe's students at the time, Ronald French, wrote to the paper to explain that the headmaster would have his classes give him random words that he would then include in his puzzles. Because the students routinely socialized and were exposed to servicemen in their neighborhoods, they naturally picked up on some of the words that these soldiers regularly used. French thought it would be clever to include these words in the crossword and gave them to the unwitting headmaster.

After his interrogation, Dawe supposedly confronted French, who admitted what he had done. Unfortunately, by the time French contacted The Telegraph, Dawe was long gone, and many are still skeptical of this explanation for the remarkable D-Day crossword puzzle coincidence.

Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of President Roosevelt, was initially told that, because of a heart condition and arthritis, he would not participate in the actual D-Day invasion. Roosevelt - armed with only a pistol and a cane - insisted and came ashore with the first wave of troops at Utah Beach, the only general to do so. Landing a mile away from his intended location, Roosevelt improvised a route inland after personally reconnoitering the area behind the beach. He would remain on the beach for the rest of the day, directing subsequent waves of troops to their improvised locations.

Ignoring bullets and explosions, Roosevelt remained a calming influence on the apprehensive soldiers who came ashore. Roosevelt passed of a heart attack one month after D-Day and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. He is buried in the American cemetery near the Normandy beachhead.   

One of the lesser-known stories of D-Day involves two American medics who provided assistance to both Allied and German soldiers who were brought into their tiny church sanctuary. Robert Wright and Kenneth Moore were parachuted behind German lines in the early hours of the D-Day invasion. Landing with other paratroopers near Utah Beach, their unit's objective was a road junction near the French hamlet of Angoville-au-Plain. Wright and Moore selected the most logical nearby structure to set up their medic station, the village church.

For three days, they tended to many wounded - including French civilians and even Germans - injured in the fierce fighting around the church. German panzer counterattacks eventually pushed American troops away from Angoville-au-Plain, but the medics decided to stay and continue to care for the many soldiers relying on them. Several times, German SS personnel angrily entered the church, intent on capturing the wounded Americans within but left when confronted with Wright and Moore also tending to seriously injured German soldiers.

Eventually, a Red Cross banner was placed in front of the building, indicating to both sides that the makeshift hospital should be left alone. Even so, there were many anxious moments for Wright and Moore, including an unexploded mortar shell that landed in the center of the church.

Midway through the ordeal, two German soldiers who were hiding in the steeple came down and surrendered to the astonished Wright and Moore. On June 8, the Germans were safely pushed out of the area, the medics having saved over 80 lives in the interim. Eventually, the destroyed stained glass windows were replaced with memorials to both the 101st Airborne and the medics themselves. The pews of the church remain bloodstained, and the cracked floor square where the mortar shell landed is still visible. Kenneth Moore and Robert Wright were both awarded the Silver Star. When he passed, the townspeople of Angoville-au-Plain honored Wright's request and buried him in the church graveyard.