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A beachhead is a temporary line created when a military unit reaches a landing beach by sea and begins to defend the area as other reinforcements arrive. Once a large enough unit is assembled, the invading force can begin advancing inland.
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Learn the meaning of beachhead, a noun that refers to an area on a hostile shore occupied by an invading army or a foothold. See examples, synonyms, word history, and related entries.
- Overview
- Hitler’s Reich, east and west
- The second front
- Operations Roundup and Sledgehammer
- Operation Overlord
- Fortress Europe
Normandy Invasion, during World War II, the Allied invasion of western Europe, which was launched on June 6, 1944 (the most celebrated D-Day of the war), with the simultaneous landing of U.S., British, and Canadian forces on five separate beachheads in Normandy, France. By the end of August 1944 all of northern France was liberated, and the invadin...
In midsummer 1943, a year before the Anglo-American invasion of Normandy that would lead to the liberation of western Europe, Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht (“Armed Forces”) still occupied all the territory it had gained in the blitzkrieg campaigns of 1939–41 and most of its Russian conquests of 1941–42. It also retained its foothold on the coast of Nort...
Since 1942 Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had been pressing his allies, U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, to mount a second front in the west. It was impossible in the circumstances. America’s army was still forming, while the landing craft necessary to bring such an army across the English Channel had not ...
Swiftly convincing himself that the priority of “Germany first” agreed to by Roosevelt and Churchill in the Atlantic Charter was correct, Eisenhower framed proposals for a 1943 invasion (Operation Roundup) and another for 1942 (Operation Sledgehammer) in the event of a Russian collapse or a sudden weakening of Germany’s position. Both plans were presented to the British in London in April 1942, and Roundup was adopted. The British, nevertheless, reserved objective doubts, and at subsequent Anglo-American conferences—in Washington in June, in London in July—they first quashed all thought of Sledgehammer and then succeeded in persuading the Americans to agree to a North African landing as the principal operation of 1942. Operation Torch, as the landing in North Africa was to be code-named, effectively postponed Roundup again, while subsequent operations in Sicily and the Italian mainland delayed preparations for the cross-Channel invasion through 1943 as well. The postponements were a principal cause of concern at inter-Allied conferences at Washington (code-named Trident, May 1943), Quebec (Quadrant, August 1943), Cairo (Sextant, November 1943), and Tehrān (Eureka, November–December 1943). At the last gathering, Roosevelt and Stalin combined against Churchill to insist on the adoption of May 1944 as an unalterable date for the invasion. In return, Stalin agreed to mount a simultaneous offensive in eastern Europe and to join in the war against Japan once Germany had been defeated.
Britannica Quiz
The decision taken at Tehrān was a final indication of American determination to stage the cross-Channel invasion; it was also a defeat for Alan Brooke, Churchill’s chief of staff and the principal opponent of premature action. Yet despite Brooke’s procrastination, the British had in fact been proceeding with structural plans, coordinated by Lieut....
Hitler had long been aware that the Anglo-American allies would eventually mount a cross-Channel invasion, but, as long as they dissipated their forces in the Mediterranean and as long as the campaign in the east demanded the commitment of all available German forces, he downplayed the threat. By November 1943, however, he accepted that it could be ignored no longer, and in his Directive Number 51 he announced that France would be reinforced. To oversee defensive preparations, Hitler appointed Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, former commander of the Afrika Korps, as inspector of coastal defenses and then as commander of Army Group B, occupying the threatened Channel coast. As army group commander, Rommel officially reported to the longer-serving Commander in Chief West Gerd von Rundstedt, though the entire structure was locked into a rigid chain of command that deferred many operational decisions to the Führer himself.
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Oct 4, 2002 · In the four months between this landing and Fifth Army's May offensive, the short stretch of coast known as the Anzio beachhead was the scene of one of the most courageous and bloody dramas of...
Winning The Okinawa Beachhead. Dawn of Easter Sunday, 1 April 1945, disclosed an American fleet of 1,300 ships in the waters adjacent to Okinawa, poised for invasion. Most of them stood to the...
Beachhead is a noun that means an area of land near the sea or a river that an attacking army has taken control of, or a position in a market that a company achieves. Learn how to use it in sentences and see translations in different languages.
Jun 6, 2014 · Learn how the Allies landed on the Normandy beaches and secured the beachheads on D-Day, 6 June 1944. See the map of the operations, the air-drop zones, the landing beaches, and the gains made on the first day.
