Could you put it in easy English?(D-Day)

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Captains paced their decks.  Pilots tapped their gauges.  Commanders pored over maps, fully aware that for all the months of meticulous planning, everything could go wrong -- the winds, the tides, the element of surprise -- and above all, the audacious bet that what waited on the other side of the Channel would compel men not to shrink away, but to charge ahead.