In 1943, German forces occupying France fortified their defenses with the“Atlantic Wall”—a series of bunkers, and batteries all along France’s northern coasts. The Allies learned the difficulty of attacking a major port from the failed 1942 Dieppe raid, in which thousands of Canadians were either killed or taken prisoner. However, convinced that the only way to overthrow Hitler was to assault his “Fortress Europe” by sea, Allied commanders decided that Normandy would be their beachhead for the liberation of France. Allied forces set the stage for the invasion by flooding German intelligence services with false information and planting dummy tanks near Norway to confuse General Rommel and his troops. The action began in the pre-dawn hours of June 6, 1944, when 29,000 troops tumbled onto the coast between the Cotentin Peninsula and Orne. A few hours later, 130,000 more troops arrived by sea; by the end of June 850,000 had landed. The losses incurred D-Day were devastating to both sides; the Allies alone lost 10,300 troops. The Allied victory was a key precursor to Paris’s August 25 liberation.