RAF Fairford, England and Blida near Algiers, Algeria • June 9/10, 1944 In planning the successful June 6, 1944, sea- and airborne invasion of German-occupied Normandy, France, Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, fully appreciated the necessity of coordinating French Resistance actions with the Allies’ strategic and tactical plans…
Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy • June 8, 1944 On this date in 1944, 2 days after the D-Day landings, a small piece of Normandy, France, became the site of the first American military cemetery to be established in Europe during World War War II. On that first day the makeshift graveyard near the badly damaged village of…
Normandy, Liberated Northwestern France • June 7, 1944 On this date in 1944 soldiers of the U.S. First Army’s 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion succeeded in permanently raising the first of a slew of 35‑ft./11.6‑m‑long hydrogen-filled, low-floating barrage balloons that would bob in the skies over Omaha and Utah invasion beaches. The morning before, hundreds of trained…
Southwick House near Portsmouth, England • June 5, 1944 Weather conditions over France’s Normandy beaches on invasion day, D-Day, tentatively set for this date, June 5, 1944, had to be as ideal as possible before Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower would issue the “go” signal for the largest sea, air, and land invasion ever executed….
Southwick House, Southeast England • June 4, 1944 Tomorrow, June 5, 1944, a Monday, was to have been an epic day—the day Allied forces invaded a 50‑mile/80‑km stretch of German-occupied beach on the French Normandy coast. The cross-Channel invasion of Northwestern France, codenamed Operation Overlord, had been pushed from May, when there had been roughly…
RAF Aldermaston and Ramsbury Airfields, England • June 3, 1944 On this date in 1944 in Aldermaston, England, men of the 434th Troop Carrier Group and the 101st Airborne Division (“Screaming Eagles”) began moving 52 CG‑4A engineless combat gliders and C‑47 Skytrain tug planes onto the airfield to lead the glider phase of Operation Overlord, the invasion…
London, England • June 2, 1944 In June 1943 in Algeria, North Africa, the Free French founded the Comité Français de Libération Nationale (CFNL). Much political maneuvering was needed to merge the Free French, whose nucleus consisted of Frenchmen who had escaped German capture at Dunkirk, the Channel port in Northwestern France (May 26 to June 4,…
Camp Savage, Minnesota • June 1, 1942 On this date in 1942 Japanese linguistic classes began at the U.S. Army’s Camp Savage, 15 miles from Minneapolis, Minnesota, for 200 enlisted men, of whom 193 were Nisei (second-generation U.S. offspring of Japanese immigrants) and the remainder Caucasian. Camp Savage’s 6-month curriculum trained Japanese-speaking soldiers in gathering, translating, analyzing,…
Pentagon, Washington, D.C. • May 31, 1945 On this date in 1945 a special group met in the Pentagon to search for an alternative to dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. The group had been called into existence by the new American president, Harry S. Truman. Neither Truman nor anyone else in the room knew…
London, England • May 30, 1944 In the run-up to the invasion of mainland Europe (Operation Overlord), the Western Allies concocted an ambitious strategic deception plan to mislead their adversaries as to where and when the actual invasion would take place. Called Operation Fortitude, the plan had 2 polar-opposite components. Fortitude North supposedly threatened German-occupied Norway…
