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 (May 26 to June 4, 1940), with politicians and armed forces from…
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 British…
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…
Slapton Sands, Devonshire Coast, Southwest England · April 28, 1944 Shortly after midnight on this date in 1944 German torpedo boats (E-boats, or Schnellboote in German) on a routine patrol out of Cherbourg in occupied France suddenly found themselves in the middle of Operation (or Exercise) Tiger (codenamed T‑4), a convoy of eight American LSTs…
London, England · January 15, 1944 On this date in 1944 Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower assumed command of the Allied Expeditionary Force preparing to liberate France from the stranglehold of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. A month earlier President Franklin D. Roosevelt had designated the 53‑year‑old army general Supreme Allied Commander for Operation Overlord, the invasion of…
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June 5th, 1944… A secret mission is launched prior to the D-Day Invasion. A small elite group of American paratroopers drop behind enemy lines and land right in the lap of the German Infantry. They are outnumbered, unsupported, and racing against the clock. Their sole duty is to stay alive long enough in order to find a strategic location and set up the Top Secret Navigation Equipment needed to guide in the main airborne assault on D-Day. Failure means the lives of thousands. This elite group of American paratroopers is a mix of renegades from different military units. They are strangers to one another, thrown together at the last minute, with no time to prepare and with two different Commanding Officers. This is a recipe for disaster. It is a violation of all the rules of warfare and only a miracle is going to make this mission work. Based on actual events. This untold story of these men, their mission and the facts behind it, has remained hidden for over 60 years.
When June 22 to December 5, 1941 Where The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, plus present-day Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and Western Russia. By July 1941, after Finland had joined the German onslaught to the north of Leningrad, the Eastern Front would eventually stretch from the Baltic Sea in the north to the…