At 6:30 a.m. On the coast of German-occupied France, the first landing craft scraped onto the sands of five Normandy beaches, Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword, and the fate of Western Europe lurched toward liberation. Operation Overlord, conceived by Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower and executed across 50 miles of French coastline, sent nearly 160,000 troops across the English Channel aboard roughly 5,000 landing craft and assault vessels, backed by 277 minesweepers and waves of airborne paratroopers who had dropped behind German lines in darkness hours earlier. British, Canadian, Free French, Polish, and American soldiers fought through murderous machine-gun fire, sea-flooded obstacles, and concrete fortifications. By nightfall, all five beaches had been seized, and the Allies began pushing inland toward Normandy. The German Army, stretched from the Eastern Front to the Atlantic Wall, never recovered its strategic footing in the West. Within a year, the Third Reich collapsed. The beaches of Normandy became the most visited military memorial sites on Earth, a permanent, sand-and-stone argument that collective sacrifice across nations can break the grip of fascism.