A parachutist during World War II, Richard Todd took part in the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944. He later played his former commanding officer Major John Howard in The Longest Day (1962), another dramatisation of the Normandy landings.
The naval scenes were shot at the former Long Beach Naval Shipyard at Terminal Island (between the San Pedro district of Los Angeles and the city of Long Beach) whilst the beach landing was filmed at California's Point Dume, a promontory on the Malibu Coast of the Pacific Ocean.
For the D-Day landing, director Henry Koster used only 80 soldiers and two LCVPs (Higgins Boats aka Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel landing craft). In the invasion scene, soldiers running out of the two landing craft appear in front of a back projection scene of another take of the same scene giving the appearance of twice as many landing craft and soldiers as there actually were.
Actress Dana Wynter (who plays Valerie Russell) picked this movie as her favorite of all her films, calling it "an unresolved love story."
This movie is based on the 1955 romantic war novel, 'The Sixth of June' by Lionel Shapiro who had been a World War II Canadian war correspondent for 'The Montreal Gazette.' He landed with the Canadian Armed Forces on D-Day for the Allied invasion of Sicily, Salerno and Juno Beach. 'The Sixth of June' novel won the Governor General's Award for English Language Fiction.