Phoenix breakwaters Phoenix breakwaters The Phoenix breakwaters were a set of reinforced concrete caissons built as part of the artificial Mulberry harbours that were assembled as part of the follow-up to the Normandy landings during World War II. They were constructed by civil engineering contractors around the coast of Britain. They were collected at Dungeness and Selsey, and then towed by tugboats across the English Channel and sunk to form the Mulberry harbour breakwaters replacing the initial "Gooseberry" block ships. Further caisson were added in the autumn of 1944 to re-enforce the existing structure to cope with the harbour continuing in use
D-Day (military term) originally set for June 5, 1944, but bad weather and heavy seas caused U.S. Army General Dwight David Eisenhower to delay until June 6 and "that" date has been popularly referred to ever since by the short title "D-Day". Because of the connotation with the invasion of Normandy, planners of later military operations sometimes avoided the term to prevent confusion. For example, Douglas MacArthur's invasion of Leyte began on "A-Day", and the invasion of Okinawa began on "L-Day". The Allies' proposed invasions of Japan would have begun on "X-Day" (on Kyūshū, scheduled for November 1945) and "Y-Day" (on Honshū, scheduled