Complete D-Day Broadcasts For June 6, 1944

I enjoyed these broadcasts so much last year, why not post them again?

At the link below you can find all 24 hours of CBS radio broadcasts on June 6, 1944, starting with Communique #1 from Eisenhower's HQ and ending with a midnight re-broadcast of the 8AM news from London on June 7.

Listen to it at the Internet Archive here: Complete Broadcast Day D-Day.

Complete Broadcast Day for D-Day

These radio broadcasts are totally fascinating, and not least for the sharp contrast they make between the dry professionalism of newsmen back in that day versus the shallow show-biz of today's news media.

The news started at midnight, when German radio first reported attacks in Normandy. At 3AM, Eisenhower's HQ released Communique #1 officially announcing the invasion. CBC updated the story throughout the day as Americans were waking up to the news. It ends with a re-broadcast of the 8AM news from London on June 7, by which time the BBC was reporting on the success of the invasion, and the advance of Allied troops several miles past the beaches.

Listen to it at the Internet Archive here: Complete Broadcast Day D-Day.

So far today, the State Department Twitter account has noticed the occasion of June 6. Neither the White House nor Obama's own account have, and I don't expect that they will.

The Longest Day, But Not the Longest Memory

We're too busy to remember now, but please call us next year

Last year on June 6, the White House sent out a lousy tweet to commemorate the 68th anniversary of D-Day, a cheap gesture which I thought was deplorable. This year, it hasn't even done that.

I know someone was using the White House Twitter account on June 6, because he or she sent a tweet decrying the lack of free Wi-Fi in our schools. But nothing about 10,000 men being killed or wounded on that day to begin the liberation of Europe from Nazi occupation. I'm partly disgusted, but also partly relieved that at least no political hack or intern used the occasion to promote the bombing of Syria.

Next year will be a round-number anniversary, and maybe our politicians will pay somewhat more attention then. At least, the French are already paying attention to the the 70th anniversary.

Something happened here 69 years ago, and it was - arguably - the most momentous event in world history. Shame on us that we don't commemorate it every year.

Computer Geeks Have the Oddest Sense of History

It is the sixth of June, and Google celebrates the anniversary of ...... Tetris, the computer game that was created on this day in 1984. Tetris?

Films of D-Day Practice Landings Located

The Daily Mail has a story today (here) about the discovery of 38 reels of film that depict parts of Exercise Tiger, the 1944 D-Day practice landings in Southwest England. During the exercise, 946 U.S. soldiers and sailors were killed when German torpedo boats attacked a convoy of landing ships.

Secret footage of U.S. soldiers training alongside British troops for D-Day in South-West England have been unearthed from a dusty archive and seen for the first time in 65 years.

The 38 reels - lasting ten minutes each - show a variety of images including tanks rolling across beaches and soldiers wading through waves. In another sequence, troops are lined up in make-shift landing barges.

Here's a link to one of the films, which shows troops deploying out of a simulated Higgins Boat landing craft (photo above).

Exercise Tiger was one of a number of pre-invasion exercises that took place in April and May of 1944. It took place at Devon's Slapton Beach, which was selected for its similarity to the portion of Normandy's coastline that was assigned to the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division in the D-Day invasion and designated "Utah" Beach. The disaster that took place during the exercise was not exactly covered up, but it certainly was officially minimized, due to both official embarrassment and pre-invasion security concerns. The residents of coastal Devon had been relocated inland as a wartime measure so there were really no civilian witnesses, and the casualty statistics from Tiger were not released until August 1944 along with the casualties of the actual D-Day landings themselves. There was little official interest in the whole sad episode after the war was over.

There's a good book about the incident (The Forgotten Dead) by the late Ken Small, which describes both the exercise itself and the author's process of discovering and memorializing what had happened at Slapton Beach, a process that began when he became curious about the large number of American military artifacts and personal belongings that he kept finding on and around the beach.