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THE BUILD UP

By June 1944, the Germans were already on the defensive.

The tide had been turned as far back as 1942 when the British 8th Army won a decisive second battle at El Alamein in Egypt, forcing the Nazis to retreat in Africa. Simultaneously, Adolf Hitler's forces had come to a standstill in Russia at Stalingrad - a battle that sucked the momentum out of the Axis.

Victories by Allied forces in North Africa led to the invasion of Sicily and later Italy but on every front the fighting was fierce and prolonged and commanders were becoming increasingly convinced that the Nazis would not be defeated until another front was opened up in Europe - a task that would require an invasion of the size never seen before.

At the Tehran summit in late 1943, US President Franklin D Roosevelt and Soviet President Josef Stalin ganged up to force Winston Churchill into accepting a date for the invasion - May 1944.

US general Dwight D Eisenhower was appointed the overall officer in charge. His deputy, in charge of ground invasion forces, was to be Bernard Law Montgomery, fresh from his leadership of the north Africa campaign and push into the Italian peninsula, as commander of the 8th Army.

The task was immense. An attempt at an invasion in 1941 had failed and the generals knew that in order to be successful, a unprecedented amount of men and equipment would have to be landed with minimal losses and deployed quickly.

Montgomery came up with the plan of attacking five beaches in the French region of Normandy, an area that was within the range of British-based air cover and yet less heavily defended than the Pas de Calais region, which was closer to England and might have been the more logical choice.

Posing a potentially impenetrable barrier to any attempted offensive was something called the Atlantic Wall - a 1,700 mile long set of fortifications constructed as part of Hitler's Fortress Europe defence plan, said by Nazi propaganda to stretch from Spain to the north of Norway.

To ensure success, the Allies wanted the Germans to carry on thinking they were more likely to make their European assault close to Calais. So, there began an elaborate game of deception, in which the aim was to trick Hitler's generals into thinking Normandy was not the target.

While much of the focus is often on the men who ran up the beaches under constant fire, less attention is paid to the hundreds of airmen who diced with death night after night carrying out air raids on targets all across northern France in an attempt to hide the real objective.

As months of air raids got under way, a massive logistics operation began to prepare to ship hundreds of thousands of men, vehicles and tonnes of supplies across the Channel.

In command of defending France from an invasion was Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the former Afrika Korps commander, who had caused so many problems for the British in Libya and Egypt.

It emerged later the Germans disagreed on how best to defend France, with different generals holding opposing views - an issue that would offer the Allies a small advantage once they had a toehold on the continent.

Rommel, however, became convinced the Allies would use Normandy to attack and bolstered defences, laying four million mines and lining the coast with a network of concrete artillery bunkers, tank traps and beach obstacles.

British and American air forces countered by carrying out reconnaissance missions in areas far beyond where they needed to be to act as a decoy and convince Rommel he was wrong.

Meanwhile, between 1 April and 5 June 1944, the British and American strategic air forces used 11,000 aircraft to fly 200,000 sorties, dropping 195,000 tons of bombs on French rail centres and roads, German airfields, radar installations, military bases and coastal defences.

As they did so, British spies on French soil worked with the Resistance to sabotage German supply lines and provide further deception.

In all, 2,000 Allied aircraft were lost, but, as more than 2,000,000 soldiers, marines and sailors massed along the length of England's south coast and 6,000 ships gathered in its ports, the armada prepared to set off.

All that mattered now was the weather - a perennial British problem. The answer was a British institution - the Met Office - whose military-led meteorologists increased their accuracy throughout the war so that, by D-Day, they correctly identified a window of ideal weather, postponing the invasion by a day.

THE AFTERMATH

The relative success of D-Day had been a stunning victory for the Allies, but it could all still go horribly wrong.

Much depended on the Nazis' ability to fight back, something they had proved themselves very much capable of on many occasions.

Hitler had warned a year earlier of "consequences of staggering proportions" if the Allies gained a foothold in Europe but, after the Atlantic Wall was breached, Germany's ability to respond was limited because of where its forces were located and the distance they had to travel to join the action.

The Third Reich also had little available air power as the Luftwaffe was fully occupied countering American daylight bombing raids at home.

The platoon commander

France was under the control of the Nazis' Western Forces chief Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. But the soldiers and tanks that occupied Normandy were from Army Group B, which was under the command of Rommel.

Because of Rommel's earlier victories, he was a favourite of the Fuhrer and enjoyed access to Hitler that Rundstedt did not have.

Even before the armada disembarked, disagreements between Rommel and other German generals about how to deal with a potential invasion had resulted in Hitler ordering a compromise which proved difficult to implement.

With beach attacks taking place in poor weather, the Germans were caught off-guard and their response was slow and confused. Rommel, who had not expected it to come when it did, was in Germany visiting his wife - tricked in part by the Allies' complex deception attempts.

Consequently, just one of the Nazis' dreaded Panzer tank divisions was immediately available for a counterattack and it was not until day two that further infantry and artillery divisions moved into the theatre, but they were delayed by sabotage, air attacks and a lack of transport.

Nonetheless, several German battle groups were able to reach Caen and in the following few days, slowed and then stalled the Allied advance towards the city.

The artillery gunner

Tommies and GIs who tried to move forward found themselves hindered by the terrain common to the area, known as bocage - a mix of small fields, surrounded by hedges and small patches of woodland. It was ideal for German machine gun ambushes.

By nightfall on 10 June, more than 325,000 Allied soldiers, 50,000 vehicles and 100,000 tonnes of supplies had come ashore, but they were bogged down.

A stalemate emerged, with the frontline running from east of the River Orne, to several miles inland north of Caen, to a small patch of land around Omaha beach.

But the Germans' attempts to stop the Allies taking Caen inadvertently prevented them from effectively defending the Cotentin Peninsula, allowing the Americans to advance on Cherbourg - a major port that, if taken, would allow the landing of a much larger number of men and pieces of equipment.

Soon, the Allies were hammering at the gates of Caen and started to push further inland in an attempt to encircle it, as US divisions pushed north towards their coveted port.

On 29 June, two days after a British elite unit of Commandos had carried out a daring raid on the local headquarters, the last of the Germans manning Cherbourg harbour surrendered - but not before the Admiral in charge had mined and crippled it.

The tank commander

Frustrating though the stalemate was, what the Allies did not know was that the series of German setbacks set off a chain of events that reinforced British, American and Canadian successes.

The German commander of the Seventh Army died suddenly on 28 June, from a suspected suicide. Days later, Rundstedt confessed to Hitler he felt his forces were being defeated and he and the commander of the tanks on the western front were dismissed.

Two weeks after that, discontent among the German high command exploded into mutiny, with a plot to assassinate the Fuhrer - later filmed as the movie Valkyrie with Tom Cruise. It failed but led to mass executions among top officers.

Still, German forces in and around Caen held out. The lack of progress had allowed reinforcements to rush to the front and hold back the Allied advance.

Caen was finally taken on 19 July and two weeks later, American soldiers reached St Malo, on the north coast of Brittany. Adding to the momentum was the next wave of Allied landings, on the Riviera to the south, a move that prompted Hitler to order a withdrawal.

But it was not until 21 August, after the battle of Falaise Pocket, that the Seventh Army was encircled and defeated.

Without a strong force holding them back, some of the Allies marched on Paris and, others, further on to Belgium.

The cost had been immense.

On D-Day itself, the US army counted 1,465 dead, 1,928 missing, and 6,603 wounded. The Canadians had 335 killed and 946 injured. The British army and navy did not publish figures but one historian later estimated that 2,500-3,000 had died, gone missing or been wounded.

But figures for Operation Overlord, the name for the Battle for Normandy, which ended only when German forces retreated over the Seine, were starker still. They included nearly 37,000 dead Allied ground forces, more than 16,000 killed airmen and over 150,000 injured armed forces personnel.

The Germans suffered similar casualty rates and several thousand French died during the shelling of Normandy towns and villages.

Yet, it could have been worse. Churchill admitted that he had been expecting the toll to be dire, telling his wife that 10,000 would be killed on that first day.

Thankfully, while extremely deadly, it is not the overall toll that D-Day is remembered and commemorated for today. In those 80 years since, there has been no let up in historians' admiration for the achievement of those who carried out the first cross-Channel invasion in more than 250 years and, most outstandingly of all, the bravery of those who made it happen.