D-Day wasn't the end of World War II, but it was the beginning of the end in Europe.
"It was the turning point of the war in Western Europe," says Florida State University military historian James Jones.
After the June 6 landings, it took the Allies more than two months of hard, bloody fighting to win the Battle of Normandy, repelling German efforts to drive them back into the sea. By August 1944 the Allies had broken out and raced across France.
French and U.S. troops liberated Paris on Aug. 25. That wasn't crucial militarily, but it was important for the troops' morale.
On the Western Front, the next important military operation after D-Day was "Operation Market Garden" in September 1944 in Holland. It could have ended the war in Europe months earlier.
The plan, under the command of British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, combined paratroopers and tanks for a drive through Germany's right flank. But a German counterattack kept the Allies from linking up.
"It was the largest airborne operation in history - before or since," says military historian Rod Paschall. "And it almost worked, which would have shortened the war considerably and left Berlin in British, French and American hands rather than Russian."
Three months later, in December, the Germans mounted a surprise attack on Allied positions in Belgium: the Battle of the Bulge, so-called for the "bulge" in Allied lines. But the Allies held. By March, they had crossed the Rhine River, encircling Germany's industrial heartland.
Meanwhile, on the Eastern Front, the Soviets were making steady progress in their march to Berlin. Jones says Westerners tend to forget the contributions Soviets made to the Allied cause - and their massive losses.
"Those cemeteries in Normandy have 9,000 dead. In Leningrad (now St. Petersburg again) there's a cemetery with 900,000 dead," Jones says. "More (Soviets) died in the 900-day siege of Leningrad (ending in 1944) than all of the American and British deaths throughout the war."
The Battle of Berlin between the Soviets and the last German defenders began in April 1945. Hitler committed suicide in his bunker on April 30, the same day the German Reichstag fell to the Soviets. The Germans signed an unconditional surrender at Reims on May 7.
But the war in the Pacific would go on for three more months.
On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. A second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9. Japan surrendered unconditionally on Aug. 14, with formal signing on Sept. 2.
