 But the Germans were already fighting Allied airborne troops, aforementioned, and could not react to the threat of the largest seaborne assault in history as it sailed toward Normandy. One German non-commissioned officer said that the ships looked like, quote, a gigantic town on the sea. The defenses at Cherbourg were so powerful that the Allied planners had to choose five beaches on which to land in what was to be the greatest campaign of the Western War.