D-Day June 6: midday - nightfall

In the event, the Allies put 155,000 men ashore at a cost of about 2,500 lives, of whom more than 1,000 had died at Omaha.

For some units, D-Day had been a bloodbath. For many, keyed up to expect the worst, it had been almost a walkover. It had proved a triumph of logistics, an operation that one officer likened to moving Birmingham across the Channel. But some of the hardest fighting of the war was to follow.

There were still huge gaps in the Allied advance and historians can only guess what might have happened if the Germans had hit back harder. But the Germans took hours to decide that this really was the long-awaited invasion and that Normandy, not Calais, was the Allies' objective. When they finally attacked, the German tanks were beaten off.

Reuben Welsh, of Brewood, a lance-sergeant in the Yeomanry, remembered the frustration of his regiment's tanks being held up on the crowded invasion beaches by 'blokes strolling around on the prom, like it was Blackpool'.

The Yeomanry managed to push inland where they met, and defeated, the only serious Nazi counter-attack of the day in a set piece ambush. The Germans sent in 50 tanks and lost 10 before withdrawing. The Yeomanry's commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Eadie, had predicted the Nazi move a month earlier and planned his ambush, supported by field guns.

Reuben Welsh recalled: "Our right flank tank was commanded by Sergeant Les Joyce, a gamekeeper before the war on Lord Dartmouth's estate at Patshull. Les had a good eye for country, and vision like a hawk. He knocked out the three leading tanks with three shots. The rest panicked and veered off north where our 'B' Squadron knocked out a further four. I believe that we saved the day. Our thin red line held and they never came again."

As the Longest Day slipped slowly into night, thousands of Commandos, paras, gunners, tank crews and infantrymen dug themselves into slit trenches in the orchards and meadows of the Bocage countryside and grabbed what sleep they could.

Bill Bennett, unaware his bravery had earned him a mention in dispatches, recalled the evening. Worn out, he and his colleagues were too exhausted to think back on what they had achieved as they rested on their ship.

"We were so tired. We had tried to sleep on the way over but we couldn't, and we had been up working all day so we just went to sleep. But I do remember that my impression of that night was of tremendous noise, with all the guns and bombs, as well as hundreds of planes, and the smell of the cordite."

Alan Rochelle, the sapper from Hednesford, recalls that morale among the men that evening was good.

"I remember being thankful that I had made it, and I thought about those who hadn't. During the day I had been with the others and been too busy to stop and think, but at night in a little trench with all the bangs and flashes going off overhead you suddenly wonder where everyone had gone, and that did feel a bit lonely. You can't appreciate what it must have been like for these men. So many lives were lost. It makes me very proud."

Lorry driver Len Whitehouse recalled: "There was a bit of a celebration on the evening and I remember filling up with tears a bit and moving away from the party. I said a little prayer for the lads who didn't make it."