Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"By the end of the day, supported by the largest fleet of ships ever assembled, more than 125,000 US, British, and Canadian soldiers had disembarked. . . . Over the next 10 weeks, the German army in Normandy lost 450,000 men, and then control of France and Belgium, and finally suffered the collapse of its Third Reich." [Furtado: 1001 Days] ". . . a good case can be made that the turning point against the Nazis had happened when the Germans were defeated at Moscow and Stalingrad. . . . In the end, the Normandy landings were a decisive moment in history, not because they saved the freedom of Western Europe from the domination of Nazi Germany, but because they preserved the freedom of Western Europe from domination by Communist Russia." [Aldrete: Decisive Battles]