Explaining D-Day, interview with John Maker

June 6, 2014, marks the seventieth anniversary of D-Day, the largest seaborne invasion in history.

The assault on the beaches of Normandy by British, American, and Canadian troops who would eventually fight their way across Europe has gone down in history as a watershed event.

The codenames of where the troops landed — Omaha and Utah for the Americans, Gold and Sword for the British, and Juno for the Canadians — remain familiar today.

The Normandy landings, part of Operation Overlord, marked the beginning of the end of six long years of conflict between Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Allied forces.

Canada’s History asked John Maker, a Second World War historian at the Canadian War Museum, some questions about D-Day.