Statistical data concerning the U.S. Army casualties in June and July of 1944 can be read in this article.
"'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 focal point of the attack apparently was aimed at Le Havre, the fine port at the mouth of the Seine. Nazi reports indicated a series of drives to cut the Brittany Peninsula with the center of gravity at Caen. It seemed certain that the Reich was awaiting news of other attacks." "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." A three page article about the unique experiences of four American glider pilots on D-Day; how they fared after bringing their infantry-heavy gliders down behind German lines, what they saw and how they got back to the beach.
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." 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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