Normandy landings (1943): Quebec

Overlord was a shipping, deception and air-superiority problem that became a hedgerow war and then a breakout -- and then a pilgrimage industry. Fortitude kept German eyes on Calais. Mulberry harbours and PLUTO were engineering as strategy. The Channel was the first enemy. Air superiority over the beachhead was a prerequisite, not a bonus.

Airborne at Pegasus, Sainte-Mere-Eglise, and the flanks; Rangers at Pointe du Hoc; Canadian and British fights inland from Juno and Gold. Omaha's bluffs created the US icon. Rommel was in Germany for his wife's birthday -- a famous absence, not a full explanation of German failure.

Caen took weeks, not a day. Cobra (25 July) broke the west. The Falaise-Argentan pocket (August) wrecked German Army Group B but did not catch everyone. French villages paid for the liberation in rubble -- a cost English beach films often skip. The American cemetery at Colleville, the British at Bayeux, the Canadian at Beny-sur-Mer, and Caen's memorial are a four-nation ritual landscape. Saving Private Ryan (1998) recut Omaha for a generation that had not known veterans as young men.