D-Day

The First Wave (Newsweek Magazine, 1944)

Down ramp!‘ shouted the coxswain from the elevated stern.

Down it came with a clank and splash. Ahead – and it seemed at that moment miles off – stretched the sea wall. At Lieutenant Crisson’s insistence we had all daubed our faces with commando black. I charged out with the rest, trying to look fierce and desperate, only to step into a shell hole and submerge myself in the channel. Luckily my gear was too wet and stinking to put on so I was light enough to come up.


This Newsweek journalist was the only allied war correspondent to have witnessed the derring-do of those in the first wave.

The First Wave (Newsweek Magazine, 1944) Read More »

War Stories from the Second Armored Division in Normandy (Yank Magazine, 1944)

An account relaying a bloody slice of life lived by the officers and men of the U.S. Second Armored Division. The story takes place on the tenth day following the D-Day landings as one armored battalion struggled to free themselves of the hedgerows, placate their slogan-loving general and ultimately make that dinner date in far-off Paris. Yank correspondent Walter Peters weaves an interesting narrative and the reader will get a sense of the business-like mood that predominated among front line soldiers and learn what vehicles were involved during an armored assault

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The German Army’s Official Report on D-Day (Dept. of the Army, 1945)

Translated from German, labeled CONFIDENTIAL and printed in a booklet for a class at the U.S. Army Military Academy in 1945 was the attached German Army assessment of the D-Day invasion. Distributed on June 20, 1944, just two weeks after the Normandy landings, the report originated in the offices of Field Marshal von Rundstedt (1875 – 1953) and served to document the German reaction to the Allied Operations in Normandy.

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The Rangers of Pointe du Hoc (Collier’s Magazine, 1954)

The triumphs of the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion on the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc on D-Day stand as a testament to the superb combat leadership skills of Lt. Colonel James E. Rudder (1910 – 1970), who is the subject of the attached article. As a participant in the planning the Allied invasion of Normandy, General Omar Bradley recognized that the German heavy guns situated above and between the Omaha and Utah beaches had to be silenced if the landings were to be successful; Bradley selected Rudder and his group to do the job, later remarking that this order was the most difficult he had ever, in his entire career, given anybody.

Written ten years after that historic day, this article is about Rudder’s return to Omaha Beach with his young son, and his recollections of the battle that was fought.

A good read; an even more in-depth study regarding the assault on Pointe du Hoc can be found at Amazon: Rudder’s Rangers.


More about Rangers can be read here…

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The Doyle Slugs It Out (Yank Magazine, 1944)

From the deck of the destroyer U.S.S. Doyle, this Yank correspondent watched for nearly three nights as the grim drama of D-Day unfolded on the American beachhead.

From the Doyle‘s decks I could see the shells strike with the naked eye. First there would be a flash and then a puff of smoke which billowed into the sky. Several tanks and landing crafts were burning at the water’s edge. Through the glasses I watched troops jump from their boats and start running up the beach.


Statistical data concerning the U.S. Army casualties in June and July of 1944 can be read in this article.

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June 6, 1944 (Pathfinder Magazine, 1944)

That was the way D-Day began, the second front the Allies had waited for for two years. It came like a shadow in the English midnight… The Nazi news agency, DNB, flashed the first story at 12:40 a.m. on June 6, Eastern wartime. Before dawn, British and American battleships were pounding shells into Havre, Caen and Cherbourg, high-booted skymen of the [88th] and 101st U.S.A. paratroop divisions had dropped into the limestone ridges of the Seine valley and landing barges filled with American, Canadian and British infantrymen nosed up to the beaches along the estuaries of the Orne and Seine rivers.

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The First 100 Hours (Collier’s Magazine, 1944)

Perched on the quarter deck of an LST off the coast of one of the American beachheads during the D-Day invasion, COLLIER’S war correspondent, W.B. Courtney, described the earliest hours of that remarkable day:

I stared through my binoculars at some limp, dark bundles lying a little away from the main activities. In my first casual examination of the beach I had assumed they were part of the debris of defensive obstacles. But they were bodies – American bodies.

The First 100 Hours (Collier’s Magazine, 1944) Read More »