On the night of June 5-6, 1944, Churchill sent a coded message informing Stalin that "the second front, about which so many copies were broken, will open in a few hours." In fact, by this time the invasion had already begun - in the operational rear of the German troops defending the coast of Normandy, paratroopers of the three Allied airborne divisions fought for key transport hubs and bridges. And at dawn, a large-scale landing from the sea began... An unprecedented armada of ships of the combined expeditionary fleet delivered the attack forces of Operation Neptune to the beaches of Normandy, which were to test the strength of the Atlantic rampart declared impregnable by the Nazis. Although the operation was preceded by two years of painstaking planning and thorough training of troops, literally from the first minute the events did not develop as expected. Uncertainty on the Normandy coast persisted for a long seven days, until the invasion forces finally managed to fulfill the first of the tasks of the Crusade to Europe - to unite disparate coastal bridgeheads into a single whole and prepare for a breakthrough deep into France. This book is dedicated to the difficult for the Allies the first week of landing in Normandy. A detailed description of the fighting on the five coastal bridgeheads precedes an overview of the large-scale efforts that made a successful invasion of northwestern Europe a reality.