Word: dday
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Frederick Painton, the Paris-based senior writer who worked on this week's cover stories marking the 40th anniversary of Dday, got his first glimpse of France in June 1945. Painton, then an 18-year-old private first class, eventually wound up in Germany as part of an intelligence unit, where he edited rambling interrogation reports on high-ranking German prisoners. "I found my year of occupation duty unpleasant," says Painton. "I still retain a sense of shock at the spectacle of a broken, defeated nation...
Senior Writer Otto Friedrich, who wrote the main cover story with the assistance of Reporter-Researcher Anne Hopkins, was also a newsman at the time of Dday, but on a small Vermont paper; at 15, a recent high school graduate, he was too young to fight. "But I followed the war closely," he says. "I remember how excited we all got on Dday. We knew it was the beginning...
Just the previous day, Stagg had warned that a gale would strike on June 5, and Eisenhower had reluctantly ordered a 24-hour postponement of Dday. The first troopships, already at sea, had to be called back. But now that the storm was actually upon them, Stagg offered what he called "a gleam of hope for you, sir." The next day, June 6, there would be some clearing of the skies, a break of perhaps 36 hours, no more. The cloud ceiling over the Normandy beaches would be about 3,000 feet, the waves only about three feet high...
Hitler launched his "retaliation" against Britain scarcely a week after Dday: some 2,300 V-1s hit London that summer, killing 5,400 civilians more or less at random. But this new terror weapon failed to achieve Hitler's hope of somehow reversing Germany's military fortunes. On June 23, the Soviets launched a gigantic midsummer offensive across a 300-mile front east of Minsk and demolished 28 German divisions within a month. On July 20, Hitler's own Wehrmacht officers turned against him. Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg planted under Hitler's conference table a bomb that was supposed...
...weapons from the Allies to arm the Free French troops, 7,000 of whom had been recruited by midsummer 1940. When he felt that Churchill and Roossevelt were neglecting him, he courted Stalin and threatened to send French forces to the Soviet front. Shut out of the planning for Dday, he retaliated by creating his own civil administration for liberated France. In the end, the general extracted just about everything he wanted from the Allies, a feat that won him the enmity of F.D.R. and the grudging admiration of Churchill. When someone suggested that De Gaulle was un grand homme...