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,…
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…
South Portland, Maine • May 6, 1943 On this date the New England Shipbuilding Corporation laid down the keel of SS Jeremiah O’Brien. Named after a Scots-Irish Revolutionary War hero from Maine (then part of Massachusetts), the SS Jeremiah O’Brien was one of 2,710 emergency cargo (EC)‑class freighters built in 18 different shipyards across the United States. The…
Sainte-Mère-Église, Liberated France • June 5, 1944 On this date in 1944 the stolid citizens of Sainte-Mère-Église, located near the center of 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…
Moscow, Soviet Union • June 23, 1944 On this date in 1944 along a 450-mile front some 2.4 million Soviet frontline and support troops, 5,200 tanks, and 5,300 aircraft smashed through German lines in present-day Belarus (White Russia and Belorussia in some earlier sources). Sabotage of rail networks and bridges by guerrillas several days before June 23 impeded German…
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…
Vichy, France • September 4, 1942 Because so many young German men were needed on Germany’s Eastern Front to engage the Soviet Army, Adolf Hitler, toward the end of spring 1942, insisted that the French collaborationist government of Philippe Pétain, whose capital was in the central France town of Vichy, assign some 350,000 French workers…