The airborne night before D-Day
1944 · Event
In the first minutes of 6 June, gliders skid to a stop yards from Pegasus Bridge and 18,000 British and American paratroopers scatter across the dark Norman countryside — seizing bridges and causeways, cutting wires, and confusing the defenders as much by their dispersal as by design.
On these timelines: D-Day & the Liberation of Europe, World War II, Master
More from D-Day & the Liberation of Europe
- Battle of Normandy (1944)
- Liberation of Paris (1944)
- The landing at Omaha Beach (1944)
- Eisenhower's weather gamble launches Overlord (1944)
- The Falaise Pocket closes (1944)
- Operation Cobra breaks out of Normandy (1944)
- Operation Market Garden (1944)
- British troops enter Bergen-Belsen (1945)
Around 1944
- Spanish Civil War (1936)
- Berlin Airlift (1948)
- Decolonisation of Africa (1952)
- World War II (1939)
- Chinese Civil War (resumed) (1945)
- Apartheid (1948)
- Manhattan Project (1942)
- Battle of Stalingrad (1942)
- Cuban Revolutionary War (1953)
- Korean War (1950)