The former Juno Beach D-Day landing zone, where Canadian forces once came ashore, in Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer, France. Once a scene of death and destruction, now a tourist's paradise. (Photo: Reuters)

On this day 74 years ago the Allied invasion of Europe that would eventually bring about the end of World War 2 and the defeat of Nazism began on the beaches of Normandy in France.

Today those same stretches of sand are home to sunbathers and tourists and apart from the odd bunker, little evidence remains of the 156,000 soldiers who took part in Operation Overlord, the largest seaborne operation in history.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill described it as: “Undoubtedly the most complicated and difficult that has ever taken place.”

Some 10,000 Allied men were killed or wounded on the first day.

View photos Tourists walk by where the body of a dead German soldier that once lay in the main square of Place Du Marche in Trevieres after the town was taken by US troops who landed at nearby Omaha Beach in 1944. (Photo: Reuters) More

It marked the beginning of an 80-day campaign to liberate Normandy which involved three million troops and cost the lives of 250,000 people.





View photos Beach goers walk past a captured German bunker overlooking Omaha Beach near Saint Laurent sur Mer. (Photo: Reuters) More

The original invasion was scheduled for 5 June but adverse weather meant it was postponed by 24 hours. Any further delays could have caused the entire operation to be cancelled as seasonal tides were crucial to the plan.

#DDay was #onthisday in 1944; here's the chart showing the all important weather window which was forecast by the Met Office and allowed the operation to take place #DDay74 #DDayRemembered pic.twitter.com/B7n9xwUOgE — Met Office (@metoffice) June 6, 2018

View photos Where Canadian troops once patrolled in 1944 after German forces were dislodged from Caen, shoppers now walk along the rebuilt Rue Saint-Pierre in Caen, which was destroyed following the D-Day landings. (Photo: Reuters) More

Of the troops that took part in the initial invasion, 61,715 were British, 73,000 American and 21,400 Canadian.

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