D Day June 6, 1944

[RoyGBiv]

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=eEIqdcHbc8I[/youtube]

[jmorris]

They are not forgotten.

My father was crew chief on C47 shot down over Germany but I believe after D-Day. But there are more important things. Our office of 800 people spent the day plastering everything in sight with Spurs stuff.

And we are Air Force. I hung D-DAY PHOTOS.

[SQLGeek]

And we are Air Force. I hung D-DAY PHOTOS.

Sad to say, very few pay it much mind these days. The folks on this forum and others like it are a minority.

[AEA]

I may have missed it

Did MaoBama take time out of his crooked doings and cover-ups to recognize those that actually saved the World?

[longtooth]

I may have missed it

Did MaoBama take time out of his crooked doings and cover-ups to recognize those that actually saved the World?

Nope.

[MoJo]

General Rommel, responsible for German defenses, figured that the
weather was so bad that the Allies would never invade that day. So he decided to take a quick road trip back
to Germany. He was out of touch with his staff at the beginning of the invasion, then had to make the long drive back to France.

SIA

Which lead to his own death by order of Hitler. He was told that if he quietly took the cyanide pill, his family would not pay the price for his failure.

According to all accounts Rommel was forced to commit suicide because he was implicated in the plot to blow up Hitler's headquarters. The Valkyrie plot. If anyone in the German COC should have taken the cyanide over D Day it should have been Hitler. He refused to release the reserve panzer divisions for days allowing the Allies time to firmly establish a beachhead.

[Purplehood]

General Rommel, responsible for German defenses, figured that the
weather was so bad that the Allies would never invade that day. So he decided to take a quick road trip back
to Germany. He was out of touch with his staff at the beginning of the invasion, then had to make the long drive back to France.

SIA

Which lead to his own death by order of Hitler. He was told that if he quietly took the cyanide pill, his family would not pay the price for his failure.

According to all accounts Rommel was forced to commit suicide because he was implicated in the plot to blow up Hitler's headquarters. The Valkyrie plot. If anyone in the German COC should have taken the cyanide over D Day it should have been Hitler. He refused to release the reserve panzer divisions for days allowing the Allies time to firmly establish a beachhead.

That can also be attributed to the Allies extensive misinformation campaign to convince him that the real attack would come from the Dover region and that the Normandy attacks were simply a diversion.

[jimlongley]

My maternal grandfather was in Hawaii until mid to late 1941, and was in transit transferring to Ft. Benning to rejoin his old friend George Patton when Pearl Harbor happened. Communications all over the US shut down as a result of the attack, so it was a while before his family, who had already moved to Benning, found out that he had not been at Pearl, but had, under orders, made a u-turn and gone back to the Pacific where he stayed, except for infrequent R&R, until 1945. He rose to the rank of Brigadier General.

My father was a "military adviser" in England starting in late 1939 to mid 1940. He arrived in England wearing his US Army Signal Corps uniform and with a satchel containing other uniforms, socks, and underwear, and was immediately told he was to only wear civilian clothes and to identify himself as a representative from MIT there to work on the radar systems, which, incidentally was true enough in itself. He stayed until almost immediately after Pearl Harbor, after which event he got to get back in his uniforms.

According to my father he was nothing much more than a messenger boy for the Pentagon after that. We knew he had been in England and Europe due to comments he made at one point or another, but he never talked about his war years other than telling a few little tales about living in England, being quartered with a family who eventually moved to the states and stayed friends with after the war, and the few stray comments overheard when he and my grandfathers and uncles got together and such things were let slip. He must have been doing something because he rose from 2nd Lt to Major during the war, and that did not occur in a vacuum.

Through research I have discovered that he was in England during the D-Day invasion, but not much more., and once, my late uncle made a comment that might have been construed to indicate that my father landed in France on D+? to do radar related things on the continent, but I have never been able to find out any confirmation of this.

We knew that he flew over Europe several times while testing on board radars, and one of his favorite "war stories" was about how he used to phone in his reports from pay phones around his area and one day he noticed that the phone kiosk was beginning to tilt. He continued to use that kiosk sporadically until one day he got there and the bomb squad was there defusing the unexploded bomb that had hit just behind the kiosk and was the reason for the tilt, and the kiosk collapsed into the tunnel it created.

The only other war story was about getting his uniforms tailored at Saville so they would cover his shoulder holster and .357 Magnum revolver, which he wore as he shuttled back and forth between England and the states. The revolver and holster stayed in his gun box when I was a kid, and then after he died my family disposed of all of his guns (and a couple of mine, a whole 'nother story) without ever notifying me. Recalling the wear and tear on the holster and (much modified for carrying in a shoulder holster) revolver, I know he didn't just do it a couple of times.

Finding out more has been one of those chores that the Army has not made any easier with the passage of time. After the war he followed the "Army Air Corps" into becoming the US Air Force and each says the other has the pertinent records from that era. One of my cousins has located a photograph of someone who bears more than just a passing resemblance to my father climbing up a Normandy beach, but we have no provenance or ID on it.