Ever since the four-wheeled Sumerian donkey chariot was replaced by the two-wheeled horse-drawn variety, war and technological innovation have gone hand and hand. In no conflict was this more apparent than World War II–arguably the first modern war. As soldiers fought from one end of the globe to the other, scientists developed many of the technologies that underlie not [...]
West Midland war veterans are to retrace their historic steps to the site of the Normandy D-Day landings after 69 years – courtesy of Birmingham’s TOA Taxis. The Birmingham taxi firm has volunteered to ferry 16 Second World War survivors by convoy to the D-Day beaches for the June 6 commemoration of the Allies’ invasion and the bloody battle against [...]
tcm.com reports: Sometimes a great filmmaker’s best intentions can be swamped by the dictates of the marketplace. 20th-Century-Fox producer Darryl F. Zanuck hoped that The Longest Day (1962), a blow-by-blow account of the Allied invasion on D-Day, would be an anti-Hollywood war movie, a picture that would, once and for all, show audiences what war is really like. But Zanuck, who may [...]
Daily Mail reports: An American World War II veteran who lost his dog tag in France nearly 70 years ago was reunited with it by Cory Booker in a ceremony Wednesday. As rain fell outside, 90-year-old Corporal Willie Wilkins was honored in a ceremony under Newark City Hall’s soaring rotunda, where Mayor Booker presented Wilkins and his daughter Carol Wilkins [...]
CBS News reports: Nearly 70 years after World War II ended, a new PBS documentary is pulling back the curtain on one of the war’s most secret missions: “The Ghost Army.” The film tells the story of an elite U.S. Army unit that deployed to Europe after D-Day and used all kinds of trickery to deceive Hitler’s generals about the [...]
IN THE opening minutes of D Day, 6 June 1944, Major John Howard led his men of the 2nd Battalion the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry in a spectacular airborne assault on the bridge over the Caen Canal. The capture of this bridge and the one over the River Orne was critical as the road they carried was the only [...]
Damn Interesting reports: Early in the morning on the 1st of May 1943, a fisherman on a beach in Spain discovered a waterlogged corpse which had washed ashore during the night. The dead man was clothed in British military attire and a life preserver, and he had a briefcase chained to his lifeless body. Apparently a casualty of an airplane [...]
Paul Woodages new book: The story of two 101st Airborne Screaming Eagle Medics on D-Day, June 6th, 1944. In Angoville-au-Plain, a small village between Utah Beach and Carentan, two medics treated over eighty casualties – American, German and French inside a 12th Century church. The book covers these events and also the history of the village throughout WWII. Paul is [...]
Bernie Mason spent World War II moving Army tanks, sometimes picking them up and setting them down with his bare hands. He’s not superhuman. And the tanks weren’t some ultralight secret weapon. It was combat trickery. As a 21-year-old lieutenant, Mason helped lead a handpicked unit of artists and creative thinkers who deployed and arranged highly detailed, inflatable rubber tanks [...]
The Telegraph Reports: 24-hour live history event D-Day: As It Happens will recreate the events of D-Day through TV, online, mobile and social media this June. Channel 4 are encouraging viewers to immerse themselves in the events of D-Day, by recreating them in real time through two TV programmes on June 5 and 6, D-Day: As It Happens will tell the [...]
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