Normandy Landings Research Articles

La propagande anti-britannique en France pendant l’Occupation

Left to fight alone after France signed the armistice on the 22nd of June 1940, Great Britain became enemy number one in the eyes of the German occupying forces and the Vichy government. This hostility found expression in a considerable quantity of propaganda in the guise of posters, tracts, booklets and brochures meant to denounce British responsibility for the conflict in the eyes of French public opinion. Propaganda was particularly intense from June to December 1940 and from January to June 1944 but the German and French propaganda services waged this psychological warfare against Great Britain throughout the war. In 1940, the anti-British brainwashing campaigns aimed at ridding the defeated French of their guilt by accusing the ex-ally of being the cause of the conflict and of deceit during the Battle of France. In 1941-1942, the Allies’ military setbacks were the subject of tracts and brochures that ridiculed British strategic skills. Propaganda was also based on the painful history of France and Great Britain so as to convince the French that England had always tried to deprive France of her colonies and that it was what she was trying to do by maintaining her presence in Africa. The major part of this propaganda was promoted by the German authorities, only to a lesser degree by the French collaboration parties. Till 1942, the Information Secretariat of the Vichy government distributed few anti-British tracts, concentrating its efforts on the promotion of the National Revolution. On the other hand, the first Anglo-American bombings in the Paris area provoked strong reactions in the Vichy government which then relied on the French population’s confusion and anxiety to denounce British policy. What was the impact of these anti-British speeches on the French population? The prefects’ reports on public opinion show that the plugging of Anglophobic sentiment had little influence on the French who were globally in complete support of the British even if they experienced doubt during short periods after the deadly bombings and at the approach of the Normandy landings.

A Power Couple in Occupied Paris

A Power Couple in Occupied Paris Jeffrey Mehlman (bio) I. capriccio tenebroso On December 7, 1941, as the world reeled from the shock of the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, Ernst Jünger, stationed with the German occupying forces in Paris, dropped by the Institut allemand in Paris and had a shock of his own. Céline was there, we read in Jünger's war diary, and proceeded to deliver himself of a diatribe on Germany's undue leniency in its policy toward the Jews. "If the Bolsheviks were in Paris, they would let you see how things are done; they'd show you how to cleanse a population, neighborhood by neighborhood, house by house. If I had a bayonet, I'd know what had to be done."1 For the aristocratic German officer, the words of the obsessed French master came as a revelation. Here, in full bloom, was the "monstrous power of nihilism [die ungeheure Stärke des Nihilismus]." The author of Le Voyage au bout de la nuit, who was prone to invoke the life sciences in his rants, was like an "iron machine" monomaniacally set on killing others. As such he was the embodiment of a world mad with technology, the very target of Jünger's onslaught against nihilism in this phase of his career. Céline makes his next appearance in the war diaries toward the end of the war. On June 22, 1944, Jünger learns that the author-novelist, [End Page 812] immediately following the Normandy landing, applied for permission to seek refuge in Germany. (It is the stuff of what may be the novelist's masterpiece, D'un château l'autre.) Jünger records his contempt: "Curious to see how individuals capable of cold-bloodedly demanding the heads of millions of men fret over their filthy little life [ihr eigenes lumpiges Leben]. The two factors must be linked."2 Exit Céline. Oddly enough, Jünger does not mention the name Céline in his diaries, but refers to him as "Merline." The other individual prominently referred to—disparagingly—in the diaries by an invented name is Hitler, who received the grotesque sobriquet "Kniébolo." Plainly it was in Jünger's self-interest to mask his apparent contempt for Hitler with a nickname, but why resort to the same tactic for Céline? Light is cast on the question by a curious episode following the war. Jünger, leafing through the French translation of his Paris war diary, was stunned to see the name of Céline where he had written Merline. Céline, upon seeing his name in Jünger's text, had flown into a rage, accused the author of Auf den Marmorklippen of being a police spy, and was said to be considering a libel suit. Whereupon, in 1951, Jünger sent Céline a somewhat abject letter of apology, first published by Der Spiegel on June 6, 1994: Cher monsieur Céline, A painful incident obliges me to write to you. Upon examining the translation of my diary, which has just been published in Paris, I came upon your name while reading a passage which, in the original German edition, mentions the name "Merline." This change, which I deeply deplore and whose causes are unknown to me, occurred without my knowledge. I reject your point of view, but nothing is more foreign to me than the intention to do you ill. In the event that you are attacked because of this passage, do not hesitate to contact me. I would then be able to contest the assertion that the reference is to you. My best wishes, Ernst Jünger3 Jünger's solidarity with the anti-Semitic "nihilist" is palpable—and he acted on it. In 1951, he testified to a judge that the name Céline was a mere printer's error.4 The aesthete-aristocrat had no desire to rock any boat. For those perplexed by how an alleged anti-Hitlerian could [End Page 813] have performed so flawlessly in Hitler's occupying army, the post-war letter to Céline may prove illuminating. The message, after all, was: I disagree...

Briefing: Engineering skills shortages in China — a personal view

Two challenges from history illustrate how to mobilise an industry to face a major challenge: the engineering infrastructure for the Normandy landings and the establishment of the UK's motorway network. China has already applied the lessons learned from these challenges to undergraduate education, but the focus is now moving to professional development. A group of leading firms, academics and ICE is cooperating to tackle this problem. This is a small step on an arduous journey but to those who judge Chinese engineers only by where they are today and not where they have come from it would be worth remembering the following Zhuang Zi quotation from the 5th century BC. ‘When Heaven is about to place a great responsibility on a man, it always first frustrates his spirit and will, exhausts his muscles and bones, exposes him to starvation and poverty, harasses him by troubles and setbacks so as to stimulate his spirit, toughen his nature and enhance his abilities.’

Frank McLaren McGown

Frank McGown served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve for most of the second world war, rising to the rank of surgeon lieutenant commander, and seeing action in Atlantic convoys...

Water supply maps for northern France created by British military geologists during World War II: precursors of modern groundwater development potential maps

Preparatory work for the Allied landings in Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944, included the creation of groundwater development potential maps for a large part of coastal northern France at a scale of 1:50 000, followed by summary maps covering coastal and inland areas eastwards into the Low Countries at a scale of 1:250 000. All these maps were compiled from sources available in the UK, almost entirely by the temporary Royal Engineers officers W.B.R. King and F.W. Shotton, under conditions of strict secrecy. Their purpose was to guide military enhancement of water supplies, especially by deployment of Royal Engineers well drilling teams, to sustain the invasion force in Normandy and its advance eastwards to Germany. A uniquely complete set of maps is preserved, together with many associated documents, in the Shotton Archive of the Lapworth Museum of Geology at Birmingham. The maps are more complex than those hastily prepared by German military geologists during the summer of 1940 to guide a cross-Channel amphibious assault in the opposite direction, into southern England. They are significant as the first British attempt to produce groundwater development potential maps for a large area at detailed (1:50 000) scale, and as the precursors of modern-day groundwater harvest potential maps.

Mapping for D-Day: The Allied Landings in Normandy, 6 June 1944

Operation Overlord, with Neptune, its naval counterpart, was the largest amphibious assault in history. On 6 June 1944, after years of planning and benefiting from the topographical preparations for, and experience of, the landings in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, over 150 000 men landed from more than 4000 ships along 80 km of Normandy coastline. Careful examination of existing maps revealed that because of its relatively flat terrain and lack of obvious physical obstacles, the area was the most suitable for and Allied invasion. Vast quantities of new maps — many drawn up from existing maps, postcards and photographs, and updated using aerial photos and intelligence from various sources — had to be prepared. Montgomery subsequently commended the D-Day survey effort, stating that map supply never failed or prejudiced operations. In turn, the planning and experience of the Normandy landings informed the preparations for operation Anvil, the landings in the south of France on 15 August 1944. This paper examines the development of Allied mapping and geographic support programmes during the two-year period of preparations for D-Day, and during the landings, establishment of the bridgehead and breakout.

Mapping for D-Day: The Allied Landings in Normandy, 6 June 1944

Mapping for D-Day: The Allied Landings in Normandy, 6 June 1944

East versus West in the defeat of Nazi Germany

One of the most commonly expressed opinions about victory in the Second World War is that the Soviet Union was mostly responsible for beating Nazi Germany. Supposedly the great land war fought between these two powers in the East was the decisive front in Europe. The West's contribution to German defeat, on the other hand, is often seen as somewhat marginal. The Anglo‐American strategic bombing campaign in 1943 paid few dividends and it was not until after the Normandy landings in June 1944 that the West really began to divert a large amount of German resources. The purpose of this article is to challenge some of these basic notions. Through analysing what Germany produced, where it was sent and how it was destroyed, the West's contribution to defeating Germany moves from an ancillary position to a dominant one. Taking German war production as a whole, from 1943 onwards the West was responsible for tying down and destroying a significantly larger share than the Soviet Union.

J. D. Bernal: A Life in Science and Politics

An eminent molecular physicist and path-breaking crystallographer, an eloquent and prescient writer on the social implications of science, an early foe of pseudo-scientific racism and an indefatigable campaigner for peace and civil rights: as a scientist and a Communist intellectual, J.D. Bernal was caught up in many of the dramas of the twentieth century. As Eric Hobsbawm describes here, Bernal played a major role in the dynamic 'red science' movement of the 1930s, whose ideas on links between science and society are only now being accorded their full significance. Bernal's The Social Function of Science remains a classic analysis of the way in which wider social relations may determine the boundaries of both scientific understanding and practice. Impressed by Bernal's relentless questioning of received ideas, Mountbatten recruited him to the brilliant scientific team of his 'Department of Wild Talents' during World War Two, to help in planning the Normandy landings. After the war, Bernal strove to combine running the Department of Physics at Birkbeck College, London, with travelling and campaigning through six continents against the nuclear threat of the Cold War. In a field notorious for its mysoginism, Bernal's laboratories at Birkbeck were a haven for many of the leading women scientists of the day, among them Rosalind Franklin and the Nobel Laureate Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. And, as James Watson has acknowledged, Bernal's X-ray photographs of molecular structures formed a vital piece of evidence on the path leading to the discovery of DNA. In this wide-ranging collection of essays, different facets of Bernal's life and work are recounted and assessed by Eric Hobsbawm, Hilary and Steven Rose, Ivor Montagu, Ritchie Calder, Francis Aprahamian, Brenda Swann, Roy Johnston, Chris Freeman and Peter Mason

Destruction and revival: the example of calvados and caen, 1940–1965

The Normandy Landings of June 1944 marked the beginning of the end of World War II and heralded the reconstruction process that would transform the appearance of towns and villages throughout Lower Normandy. After a relatively quiet war, the city of Caen and its surrounding countryside suffered profound devastation in 1944. Once peace was restored, German prisoners of war and French labourers cleared mines, removed debris, and erected temporary accommodation before definitive reconstruction began. After consulting earlier proposals for remodelling inner Caen, Mayor Guillou appointed Marc Brillaud de Laujardière as chief architect and city planner. In the 1950s reconstruction co‐operatives played a vital role in rebuilding inner districts, where fragmented landownership was reorganized and apartment blocks replaced family houses. The heroic events of the Landings are evoked in the Memorial at Caen and in countless other museums, but the dramatic restoration of Normandy tends to be dismissed and simply taken for granted in fashioning the landscapes of everyday life.

The Annual Meeting of the History of Anaesthesia Society, 1998

When we looked out of our hotel win­ dow in Southend-on-Sea, where our Brit­ ish colleagues held their Annuallvleeting in late June, we could see right across the Thames Estuary, at this point about five miles wide. Across the water, on Canvey Island, we could sec the outline of one of England's largest gas-works. It was grey and a gale was blowing, such as must have disrupted the Normandy landings. The Union Jack outside the hotel was hyperac­ tive. One might call it a romantic indus­ trial landscape. The 1998 banner of the History of Anaesthesia Society.

The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemunde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (review)

Reviewed by: The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era* Arden Bucholz (bio) The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era. By Michael J. Neufeld. New York: The Free Press, 1995. Pp. xiii+368; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $25. Michael Neufeld, curator of World War II history at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, aims to provide a balanced and readable history of the German liquid-fuel rocket project. In large measure he has done so. The archival foundations—mainly fourteen tons of materials buried in a mine in north central Germany, seized in 1945 and later microfilmed by the U.S. Army, and archives in Berlin, Koblenz, Freiburg, Munich, and elsewhere— [End Page 574] seem to have been well used. One can only wonder, however, if everything has been looked at; the guide alone to some of the microfilms is almost three thousand pages long. Additionally, the author used more than a dozen interviews with participants. The German rocket work described here had four stages. The first, in the 1920s, grew from the fact that the constrictive weapons clauses of the Treaty of Versailles did not mention rockets. Although amateur inventors and Fritz Lang’s film The Woman in the Moon led to a certain popularization of the idea of space flight, it was Karl Becker, with a doctorate in engineering, who pushed the idea into practicality. As dean of the faculty of military technology at the Technical University, Berlin, he sought projects that would provide funding and draft exceptions. When he later became head of army ordnance, Becker converted the banned Prussian artillery laboratory into a university institute with a small group of former Prussian officers. University science, allied with and paid for by the military bureaucracy, propelled this work from then on. The second phase began with the Nazi accession to power in January 1933. Although the Nazi regime became a collection of warring bureaucratic empires, these empires had access to greatly expanded rearmament funding. By the time Werner von Braun, then a young student, graduated in 1934, his dissertation was so secret that even the title was classified. Becker, Walter Dornberger, and von Braun made an alliance with Goering’s Luftwaffe to allow Peenemünde to be built. The third stage of rocket work began in September 1939 with World War II. This period saw the decline of the army’s power within the overall Nazi state and the frantic search for funds and support from other government sources, who long remained unconvinced of the rockets’ utility. The direction of the war after December 1941 and the search for miracle weapons with which to rescue Germany propelled Armaments Minister Albert Speer and, later, SS Gen. Hans Kammler into rocket work. In the last several years of World War II, Germany employed massive slave labor to build the missiles. Two months after the Allied landing in Normandy, when it was clear that hundreds of cruise missiles—the V-1—fired each week on London had failed to change the course of the war, Hitler ordered renewed emphasis on the missile upon which their hopes still depended, the A-4. The results of this final effort were marginal. The A-4, the only one of sixteen rocket projects to have a substantial production run (6,000), was a unique weapon: more people were killed making it than died from being hit by it. But it was too little, too late. The problems, as Neufeld outlines them, were many. First, electronics and computers were then too primitive for the missile technology to be cost effective. Additionally, the missiles were prematurely forced into mass production by a manufacturing organization ill prepared for this. Other manufacturing problems were the confusion in component production and the constant alterations in the details [End Page 575] of various parts. The result was that the actual weapon had a much greater margin of error than postwar technology. Stage four of rocket work took place after 1945, after the United States and Soviet Russia split the scientific spoils of war. The United States got most of it because the German rocket workers...

Engineering geosciences and military operations

The earliest recorded use of geology for the terrain assessment of the battlefield occurred at Katzback in 1813 and contributed to the defeat of Napoleon's Army. Ever since, most major military operations have utilized geologic counsel to evaluate the terrain and features or execute battle actions. The value of geologic insight was recognized in books on the military applications of geology in 1859 and 1885 and the release of “Militargeologie” in 1913 by a German Army officer. During World War I, geologic data became available on specialized maps for: trafricability and movement of supplies, vehicles and personnel; identifying water and construction materials sources; planning and design of surface and underground fortifications; and guidance of underground warfare via tunneling. U.S. Forces (1917–1918) prepared the first engineering geology maps for battlefield use and construction of field works. All participants acknowledged the importance of geology after the war for resources, strategy, and understanding battleground features for tactics and combat. A field manual for Military Geology (Wehrgeologie) was released by the German Army in 1938. The geologic assessment of potential battle areas and strategic features became increasingly important during World War II, for example, pre-war German terrain maps of North Africa with location of water sources and the wadis, steep-walled barriers to mechanized movements. The U.S. Military Geology Unit prepared geologic folios for the southern European operations and throughout the Pacific Island region. The British Military Geology Unit supplied maps and geologic counsel for the western European operations. Refinement of on-going geological practices aided such operations as: the selection of airborne landing sites and airfields, beachheads and assault landings; location and construction of surface and underground protective installations; as well as other works, for example, harbors for Normandy landings. Military geophysics became critical for naval purposes, for example, development of magnetic and acoustically active mines, tracking German U-boats and supplying maps of the sea bottom and sediments; aerial heat-sensing techniques identified Vietnam Era movements beneath the jungle cover. During the 1940s and 1950s, GeoScience principles and techniques were utilized on an unprecedented scale for military and engineering purposes. Tunneling, so successful by Union Forces in Civil War and by the British in World War II, became a major offensive weapon of the North Koreans in the 1950s. Infiltration tunnels exist today beneath the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and South Korea. The permanent Military Geology Branch, U.S. Geological Survey (1946), studied atomic test sites in the Pacific and Nevada. Research by U.S. Army Corps Engineers and RAND Corporation led to the design and construction of underground installations by the 1960s. Geoscientists interpreted the Rainier (1957) nuclear detonations and discriminated between a nuclear explosion and a seismic event. This National Security project ( 1957–1966) relied on many GeoScience principles and techniques. and the Plowshare program of the 1960s adapted this database for many potential military and industrial purposes. Geologic efforts during the Vietnam Era of widespread guerilla warfare required a shift from the established approach of folios and terrain maps by a centralized geological unit. Geologic functions were largely refocused from the army combat forces to the Defense Intelligence Agency by the 1970s. Many National Security projects serve the military establishment and are dependent on the principles of geoscience.

The Development of Shipborne Navigational Radar

This paper was first published in the Journal in 1947 (Vol. 1, p. 118). Sections 1 and 2 are summarized in order to save space. Sections 3, 4 and 5 are reprinted with only a little abridgment. The paper is followed by comment from the original author.The original paper gave a comprehensive account of the development of navigational radar in the United Kingdom from the beginning of World War II up to the time of writing.The use that was made of the very early radars was mentioned and the improvements brought about by the introduction of the PPI (Plan Position Indicator) and centimetric radar were described. An account was given of how radar assisted the Normandy landings, and of the techniques employed including the use of radar predictions of the Normandy coastline (produced in great secrecy) which were optically superimposed on the PPI. Also shown on the predictions were the planned approach tracks to the shore. An example of one of these predictions compared with the post-invasion radar photograph is shown in Fig. 1. This superimposition of geographical information on the PPI was to become of great significance in later years.

World War II, film, and history

The immediacy and perceived truth of the visual image, as well as film and television's ability to propel viewers back into the past, place the genre of the historical film in a special category. War films-including antiwar films-have established the prevailing public image of war in the twentieth century. For American audiences, the dominant image of trench warfare in World War I has been provided by feature films such as All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory. The image of combat in the Second World War has been shaped by films like Sands of Iwo Jima and The Longest Day. And despite claims for the alleged impact of widespread television coverage of the Vietnam War, it is actually films such as Apocalypse Now and Platoon which have provided the most powerful images of what is seen as the of that much disputed conflict. But to what degree does history written lightning, as Woodrow Wilson allegedly said, represent the reality of the past? To what extent is visual history an oversimplification, or even a distortion of the past? Exploring the relationship between moving images and the society and culture in which they were produced and received, World War II, Film, and History addresses the power these images have had in determining our perception and memories of war. Examining how the public memory of war in the twentieth century has often been created more by a manufactured past than a remembered one, a leading group of historians discusses films dating from the early 1930s through the early 1990s, created by filmmakers the world over, from the United States and Germany to Japan and the former Soviet Union. For example, Freda Freiberg explains how the inter-racial melodramatic Japanese feature film China Nights, in which a manly and protective Japanese naval officer falls in love with a beautiful young Chinese street waif and molds her into a cultured, submissive wife, proved enormously popular with wartime Japanese and helped justify the invasion of China in the minds of many Japanese viewers. Peter Paret assesses the historical accuracy of Kolberg as a depiction of an unsuccessful siege of that German city by a French Army in 1807, and explores how the film, released by Hitler's regime in January 1945, explicitly called for civilian sacrifice and last-ditch resistance. Stephen Ambrose contrasts what we know about the historical reality of the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, with the 1962 release of The Longest Day, in which the major climactic moment in the film never happened at Normandy. Alice Kessler-Harris examines The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, a 1982 film documentary about women defense workers on the American home front in World War II, emphasizing the degree to which the documentary's engaging main characters and its message of the need for fair and equal treatment for women resonates with many contemporary viewers. And Clement Alexander Price contrasts Men of Bronze, William Miles's fine documentary about black American soldiers who fought in France in World War I, with Liberators, the controversial documentary by Miles and Nina Rosenblum which incorrectly claimed that African-American troops liberated Holocaust survivors at Dachau in World War II. In today's visually-oriented world, powerful images, even images of images, are circulated in an eternal cycle, gaining increased acceptance through repetition. History becomes an endless loop, in which repeated images validate and reconfirm each other. Based on archival materials, many of which have become only recently available, World War II, Film, and History offers an informative and a disturbing look at the complex relationship between national myths and filmic memory, as well as the dangers of visual images being transformed into reality.

The Longest Day Turns Fifty.

The Longest Day Turns Fifty Raymond A. Callahan (bio) Stephen E. Ambrose. D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. 655 pp. Maps, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00. Robert J. Kershaw. D-Day: Piercing The Atlantic Wall. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1994. 245 pp. Maps, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. The fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, 1994 saw a flood of books on the subject. None of the works is likely to approach in impact Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day, which first appeared in 1959 and a few years later as a Hollywood movie that fixed the image of the Allied landings in Normandy firmly in the popular mind: the British gliderborne attack on what is still called Pegasus Bridge; the widely scattered American airborne descents (with one unfortunate paratrooper ending up suspended by his chute from the church steeple at St. Mere-Eglise); the American Rangers scaling the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc to capture, expensively, empty gun emplacements; the shambles on Omaha and the fortuitously easy assault on Utah. It seems that successive anniversaries of June 6, 1944, simply replay these stories — in print, in speech and, of course, on film. Stephen Ambrose brings to the task of retelling the story of D-Day impressive credentials. From working as one of the editors of Eisenhower’s wartime papers, he went on to write an excellent account of Ike’s three years (1942–45) as an Allied supreme commander and then a two-volume biographical study of the general and president. As the head of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, Ambrose and a team of assistants have collected nearly fifteen hundred oral history interviews with veterans, which are the heart of this book. Ambrose, of course, puts these personal accounts into a larger context — Anglo-American debates on strategy, training and preparation in England, the whole incredibly complex business of mounting the largest aerial and amphibious assault in history is laid out for the reader. The heart of Ambrose’s narrative, however, is June 6, and especially the American experience on that day, for the heroes of this story are [End Page 313] the rank and file who, at the “sharp end,” made the planners’ concepts and commanders’ intentions work. Ambrose has clearly conceived a great affection for the American soldier (and sailor) of 1944, and this book is perhaps best seen as a tribute to the generation of American veterans who fought the “last good war,” whose greying ranks are now beginning to thin. There is little new for specialists, but this is not a book written for specialists. Its audience is the broader public, and that Ambrose has gotten the tone and balance right for such a narrative seems amply attested by the book’s summer-long presence on the best-seller list. This is all to the good — if capable historians scorn the “popular” market, the market will not disappear but will merely be served by bad historians. Robert J. Kershaw’s book is cooler in tone but similar in many ways. An officer in the British army, Kershaw extends his story to June 18, by which time the bridgehead was secure and the emphasis shifted from consolidating a foothold to breaking out of a beachhead. Kershaw covers all the lodgement areas, and both sides of the firing line, with even-handed skill. As he did in his earlier study of the ill-fated operation “Market Garden,” It Never Snows in September (1990), he makes excellent use of German material. Anyone — specialist or general reader — interested in the story of June 6, 1944, on the beaches of Normandy, and the manner in which the thousands of individual decisions and actions taken (or not taken) on that day coalesced into the mosaic that we remember and commemorate will find these two books well worth the time spent reading them. The intense concentration on D-Day itself, however, does seem to have kept certain very important issues from being developed in both of these books. One of the enduring controversies about D-Day (and the ensuing weeks) has to...

Hidden Ally: The French Resistance, Special Operations, and the Landings in Southern France, 1944.

Preface Preparations: Resistance and Special Operations Introduction Resistance in Southeastern France Special Operations in Southeastern France Impact of the Normandy Landings Preparations for ANVIL/DRAGOON Eve of the Landings ANVIL/DRAGOON: The Main Thrust to Grenoble and the Rhone Valley The Landings Task Force Butler and the Liberation of Digne Liberation of Gap and Grenoble The Third Division to the Rhone Task Force Butler to the Rhone MonTElimar and Valence The Flanks East: The Dauphine Alps East: Cannes and Nice West: Toulon and Marseille West: Across the Rhone--The Ardeche From Grenoble and MonTElimar to Lyon North of Grenoble End of DRAGOON: Meximieux and Lyon Conclusion Appendix: Special Operations in Southeastern France Glossary Sources Selected Bibliography Index

D-Day and Geography

When the Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy early on the morning of 6 June 1944, they launched the most massive military undertaking of World War II. Since then those beaches have borne the code names Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword, the components of Operation Overlord, which is popularly known as D-day. The landings set the stage for the beginning of the end of German occupation of France. The operation was both enormous and complex. Counting combat troops and personnel involved in administrative and logistical support, between 2.6 and 2.7 million individuals participated. Published print, video, and filmed material on the events of the spring and summer of 1944 proliferated in Great Britain, France, and the United States before and after the fiftieth anniversary of D-day. The focus of this article is the crucial role of weather and tides, physical-geographic factors fundamental to the choice of the invasion date. Situated between Brittany and the western part of the Paris Basin, the Normandy peninsula is rimmed by sand or pebble beaches backed by cliffs that give way to a pastoral landscape of farms and villages. Irregular hills are separated by marshland and several small rivers. Scattered forests contain mixed stands of oak, chestnut, and beech. The countryside is a patchwork of old earthworks and hedgerows, known locally as bocage, that protect livestock and crops from the bone-chilling Atlantic winds. A characteristic landscape west of Rouen, bocage is an irregular patchwork of low trees and thick, high hedges alternating with small fields or meadows and pastures. Much of the fighting took place in the bocage. These hedges, four to five feet high and almost as thick, were capable of stopping a tank, and frequently did, until an American soldier hit on the idea of attaching steel blades on the front of his tank to uproot the tangled vegetation. Fields contain corn, buckwheat, and barley, and pastures are covered with wildflowers in the spring. Fruit orchards abound; apples yield the regional specialties -- cider and Calvados. Seaweed and kelp are gathered to use as fertilizer on the local farms, which are underlain by rocky soil. The soils are thin, comprising sand, limestone, marl, chalk, and, in places, flint. Although the interior exhibits some upwarping, the coasts are somewhat lower but rimmed with steep, eroded cliffs, especially in the eastern portion. The location of Normandy, both as a gateway to the continent and an exit from the European mainland to the British Isles, has seemed to invite military incursions throughout history. The D-day operations were the most recent of actions that are rooted in antiquity. In 1940 Germany overran France with frightening rapidity. The need for a cross-channel invasion to liberate France was recognized, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill noted in the fall of 1941 that it would occur when the tide turned more strongly in favor of the Allies. Stalin had been urging the opening of a second front soon after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. In January 1943, at the Casablanca conference, a committee was formed to devise a plan for Operation Overlord, the code name chosen for what was to become the Normandy landings. In 1944 what was probably the most ambitious amphibious invasion of modern times was launched in Normandy. Success or failure of the operation hinged on suitable weather conditions. Thus selecting the date of the assault required the talents of the most skilled meteorologists available. The 1942 landings in North Africa provided some lessons for a large-scale amphibious operation. The problem there, as for Normandy, concerned the limitations of long-range forecasting. A universally accepted technique to predict weather accurately for more than one or two days did not, and does not, exist. American meteorologists had been working on five-day forecasts, but the British had found such forecasts to be of little value. …

The defence of Northern Norway

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsF.P.U. CrokerThe author, as a midshipman took part in the 1940 Norwegian operations in HMS Manchester, then flagship of the 18th Cruiser Squadron, including the troop landing at Mölde and at the withdrawal of survivors a week later from burning Aandalsnes. He was in Tobruk during the closing weeks of the first seige in 1941, and as Secretary of the First LST Flotilla, was present at the Salerno follow-ups in 1943 and at Anzio and Normandy landings and follow-ups in 1944, in Landing Ship (Tanks).

Shakespeare USA: The BBC Plays and American Education

B ORN IN THE BICENTENNIAL FERVOR OF 1976, it was to be grand AngloAmerican enterprise, cultural equivalent of Normandy landing, Lend-Lease Act, and Marshall Plan all rolled into one. The British Broadcasting Corporation and Time-Life Television would produce all plays in special made-for-television productions tailored to general audiences. Designed to be enduring and easily understood, productions would deliberately adhere to plain style: William Shakespeare wrote his plays to please an audience that was neither very sophisticated nor literary, said Shaun Sutton, head of BBC's television drama group, and we hope to bring back these plays on same plain terms to mass audience that would have astounded Shakespeare. Undoubtedly, project will have wide educational future; but primarily, plays will be presented as they were first conceived-as entertainment.I Underwriters for $13.6 million venture were to be three corporate giants: Exxon Corporation, Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York, and Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) would supply funding for ancillary educational activities, including special programs on National Public Radio. And WNET/Thirteen in New York would coordinate broadcasts and educational outreach in United States. Pointing out that American funding came to only $100,000 play, WNET President John Jay Iselin accurately summed up high hopes with which series began, calling it the great Anglo-American alliance of twentieth century. Iselin predicted that it would bring about a Shakespeare Renaissance and special educational experience for generation of Americans. 2 Such were high spirits that inspired unusual collaboration of television