ABSTRACT
Just after midnight, on June 6, 1944, the Allied forces undertook one of the greatest risks of World War II when they invaded Normandy. Preparations for the world’s largest invasion, dubbed Operation Overlord, were long, well over a year, and confidence was cautious. Certainly, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt expected success, but they also expected enormous casualties. Before retiring for the evening Clementine Churchill joined her husband in the Map Room where the Prime Minister is reported to have said to her, “Do you realize that by the time you wake up in the morning twenty thousand men may have been killed?”1
