Mariana Islands, Central Pacific · June 19, 1944 On this date in 1944 a huge gale hit the two gigantic artificial harbors known as Mulberry harbors that the British had built in England, floated across the English Channel, and deposited on Normandy’s beaches several days after the Allies’ June 6 invasion of German-occupied France. The…
Normandy, Liberated France · June 6, 1944 It was a cloudy D-Day. Already Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe had surrendered air supremacy over the English Channel, when on this date in 1944 in Normandy, France, the U.S. First Army under Gen. Omar Bradley assaulted Utah and Omaha beaches, while to the east British and Canadian units of…
Sainte-Mère-Église, Liberated France · June 5, 1944 On this date in 1944 the people of Sainte-Mère-Église on the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy, France, retired to their beds on the eve of the largest air- and seaborne invasion in history—Operation Overlord. As early as 1942, U.S. military planners had been eyeing this crossroads town. If the…
London, England · June 4, 1944 Tomorrow, June 5, 1944, a Monday, was to have been the big day, the Allied invasion of a 50‑mile stretch of German-occupied beach on the French Normandy coast. The invasion, codenamed Operation Overlord, had been pushed from May, when the weather had been perfect, to June to allow another…
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 began moving 52 CG‑4A gliders and C‑47 Skytrain tow planes onto the airfield to lead the glider phase of Operation Overlord, the invasion of Nazi-occupied France….
London, England · June 2, 1944 In June 1943 in Algeria, North Africa, the Free French founded the French Committee of National Liberation. 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 Northeastern France (May 26 to June…
London, England · June 1, 1944 In June 1942 members of the French Resistance provided British intelligence with a copy of the top-secret blueprint of portions of Adolf Hitler’s Atlantic Wall—part of the defenses against the anticipated Allied invasion of Western Europe. The map had been spirited from the office of the German public works…
Off the Normandy Coast, Occupied France · May 29, 1944 The German Kriegsmarine possessed several notable midget submarines (Kleinst-U-Boote), one being the one-man Biber (German for “beaver”) and the other the two-man Seehund (German for “seal”). Neither U‑boot was particularly successful as a weapon against Allied supply and troop ships. Influenced by a captured one-man…
With Maj. Gen. Mark Clark in Italy · May 25, 1944 In 1943–1944 the centerpiece of German defenses in Italy was the Gustav Line, whose most famous bastion was centered on the historic Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino. Thousands of German soldiers and conscripted Italian civilians worked hard to strengthen the line, 65 miles north of…
Berlin, Germany · May 24, 1943 In June 1942 German submarines sank 637,000 tons of British shipping—a greater total than in any previous or subsequent month. So many prowling U‑boats made it hard for merchant convoys sailing in the major trans-Atlantic traffic lanes to evade detection. The next year, in March, Atlantic U‑boats sank 82 ships (476,000 tons)…
