The Longest Day Summary

The book i chose to read for my book report was The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan. It is a nonfiction book about D-day, set mostly in Normandy, France. It is in the Allied point of view for most of the book. Some of the main characters that it follows are Dwight D. Eisenhower, Hitler, and many different Generals that were under both Eisenhower and Hitler’s command.

The first section of the book tells about the wait and anticipation of the attack. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the General for the U.S. army who planned the D-Day attack, was forced to delay the attack many times because of inadequate weather. One of the main problems with the weather was that they need sufficient clearing in the clouds for a successful air attack. Also they wanted

They had over 22,000 airborne soldiers landing in Normandy. The two main objectives were to disable the German defences and to set up the land for the rest of the invasion. The landings did not go quite as well as planned, partially because of the poor weather adding lots of issues, also many of the pilots lacked experience for these types of conditions. They had three main groups of soldiers in the airborne division : pathfinders, jumpers, and replenishment.

There were 300 pathfinders that were in charge of clearing landing zones and setting up lights to mark the drop zones for the latter landing missions. Their landings were not very effective for many reasons. One of the main reasons was that the weather was not ideal and they had a hard time recognizing the landmarks that they were using to base their location around. Because of this many of pathfinders landed and set up drop zones in incorrect spots. Most the drop zones tended to be set up a mile off of the target. The lights that they were using to mark the drop zones were not very helpful when the second wave came in because they could not see them very well in addition to most of them being of