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Yesterday was June 6th, the 66th anniversary of the successful 1944 Allied invasion of France. Several operations were combined to carry out the largest amphibious invasion in history – over 160,000 troops landed on June 6th, assisted by over 5,000 ships, aerial bombardment, gliders and paratroopers. Thousands of soldiers lost their lives on those beaches on that day – many thousands more would follow as the invasion succeeded and troops began to push German forces eastward, eventually leading to the Allied victory in 1945. Collected here are some photographs of the preparation, execution and immediate aftermath of the 1944 D-Day invasion of Normandy, and a few images from 2010…

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The evacuation from Dunkirk of nearly 340,000 troops under “Operation Dynamo” is one of the most momentous events of World War II. See how the story unfolded in maps from 27 May-4 June 1940.

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A World War II fighter pilot from Ferndale, Wash. is headed back to Germany to revisit one of the most notorious concentration camps in which he was held prisoner.

At 88 years old, it may be hard for you to envision Joe Moser as a hotshot fighter pilot. But that’s what he was – Flying P-38s until he was shot down two months after the D-Day invasion of France.

“Parachute opened. Saw my plane crash, then I hit the ground,” said Moser. His left engine was shot after attempting to attack a truck convoy outside of Paris. Within 15 minutes he was captured, despite an attempt by some French farmers to hide him.

But that wouldn’t be the scariest part of his experience. You see, Moser and more than 160 other captured Allied airmen didn’t go to a POW camp.

By way of the NAZI SS, they ended up in Buchenwald – one of the most notorious concentration camps of the war. And when he saw the people inside, “They were just skin and bones, the people you could see through the fence. Thousands of them. What are we getting into here, you know,” said Moser.

Buchenwald was foremost a forced labor camp, making weapons including parts of the V2 rocket. It’s also a place where estimates say nearly 57,000 people also died. But the pilots refused to work…

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A Fighter Pilot in Buchenwald: The Joe Moser Story

Up to 25,000 people died in the Allied bombing of Dresden during World War II – fewer than often estimated, an official German report has concluded. The Dresden Historians’ Commission published its report after five years of research into the 13-15 February 1945 air raid by Britain and the US. The study was aimed at ending an ongoing debate on the number of casualties in the German city.

Germany’s far-right groups claim that up to 500,000 people died. They say the bombing – which unleashed a firestorm in the historic city when Nazi Germany was already close to defeat – constituted a war crime.

Critics say there was no military reason for it, but others argue that Dresden was an important logistical point close behind German lines, as the Soviet Army approached from the east…

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The campaign follows the Belgian government’s decision to close 23 barracks across the country by 2011, including the so-called ‘Heinz’ barracks at Bastogne where US General Anthony McAuliffe had his headquarters during famous Battle of the Bulge in 1944.

The announcement by defence minister Pieter de Crem has caused a storm of protest among US and British war veterans as well as many other people living in Belgium.
A war veteran’s group has written to Howard Gutman, new-appointed American ambassador to Belgium, appealing to him to intervene and help halt the closure.

The barracks is the home of the Belgian 1st Field Artillery Regiment, currently deployed in Afghanistan, and also houses a small museum dedicated to the sacrifice made by US and British troops.

The Battle of the Bulge has special significance for allied war veterans as it is seen as key turning point in WW2.

From 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945, a snow-covered Bastogne was encircled by German troops and appeared set to capitulate. Within the small town set deep in the Ardennes forest close to the border with Luxembourg were thousands of US soldiers, including the 101st Airborne Division, commanded by McAuliffe, whose HQ was in a cellar of the barracks now earmarked for closure.

It was from here on December 22, 1944 that the German Commander Heinrich Freiherr von Luttwitz sent McAuliffe a note demanding the Americans surrender, to which McAuliffe famously sent a terse reply which read, “NUTS!”

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The French town of St. Mere Eglise was the first to be liberated June 6, 1944, during the Normandy Campaign of World War II. Years later, Philippe Esvelin, whose parents grew up in Le Muy, decided to write a book detailing some of the lesser-known heroes of World War II: the glider pilots. His book, “Forgotten Wings,” details the history and use of gliders in the war, and Melvin Pliner of Safford is featured on the cover as well as on double pages inside.

Pliner grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. When he was 16, he volunteered for the Citizen’s Military Training Corps and was trained in field artillery. When World War II started and America began the draft, he was certain he would be drafted, and his experience with the training corps almost guaranteed he would be sent into military artillery, and he didn’t want that.

Instead, he enlisted himself into the U.S. Army Air Corps in hopes of becoming a pilot. Unfortunately, everyone who joined the Air Corps also wanted to be a pilot, and the waiting list was long…

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Seventy years after the eruption of World War II, Poland is paying homage to Polish victims of the 1939-1945 Nazi occupation by posting their names on a vast historical list in cyberspace.

The project aims to bring to light the names of victims — both those who perished and those who were persecuted but survived — who were never registered, as well as to gather death records dispersed across Poland, Germany, Ukraine, and Israel in one place accessible to all.

“How many forms do I have to fill out if I’m the only survivor in my family of five?” Maria Gnietczyk, 82, a onetime detainee in the Auschwitz Nazi German death camp, asks personnel responsible for the website in Warsaw.

She is told to fill out five, for her late relatives and herself as an Auschwitz survivor.

Questionnaires can be filled out either online or, more traditionally, on paper.

“In the space of two weeks, more than 1,500 questionnaires were submitted over the Internet,” says Ewa Tazbierska of a group called the Polish-German Reconciliation Foundation, a foundation created by both governments, now in charge of the website at: http://www.straty.pl

People killed during military offensives, in combat, by execution and those who perished in death camps and ghettos can be registered with the site. Historians check each name to avoid any duplications…

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A soldier who helped build a strategic airfield near Caen during the D-Day landings said his regiment’s contribution to the historic moment has been forgotten in history.

Lindsey Jones, 85, from Ewell, helped build an airfield near Caen which was vital to landing heavy duty tanks in France to help push out the Germans.

However, he has not been able to find any record of their heroic efforts.

He was just 16 when the war broke out and immediately went to Brighton to join the Army.

By the time of the D-Day landings he found himself in the Royal Engineers.

Their mission, on June 6, 1944, was to construct an airfield near Caen so planes carrying military tanks could land and roll out the vehicles to help in the fight against the Germans…

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For the 65th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy, an association of local towns in the American sector of the invasion (Sainte Mere l’Eglise, Utah Beach) commissioned a GPS tour guide to visit the beaches and the inland countryside to better understand the events which took place on June 6, 1944.

Created by the French GPS multimedia tour guide company Camineo, the whole project cost was €60,000, reported the local press. The tour is offered on a Windows Mobile PDA from Mio Technologies. The rental cost €8 and is available at the local tourism office.

Based on many unpublished visual documents from the US Army and the Caen Memorial (museum), the tour includes 30 minutes of videos and almost 500 pictures of the invasion, as well as a spoken text from French writer Gilles Perrault, well-known for writing several books on the Normandy invasion and World War II. The guide is available in English and French…

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Men and women from the Irish Free State who fought in World War Two have not been given the respect they deserve, a historian has said.

A new study by the University of Edinburgh has found more than 3,600 soldiers from the south of Ireland died on active service during WWII.

Their names join those of almost 3,900 fallen combatants from Northern Ireland on a roll of honour being unveiled at Trinity College Dublin on Friday.

The study estimates that in the British army alone, as many as 100,000 people from the island of Ireland served in WWII, despite the Irish Free State’s neutrality in the conflict.

The role of soldiers from Northern Ireland is well-acknowledged, but it was a different story for veterans in the south coming home to a country whose leader Eamon de Valera had paid his respects to the German representative in Dublin when news of Hitler’s death emerged.

WWII broke out just 18 years after partition and the Irish War of Independence, and soldiers were seen as having fought for a foreign power…

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The gray wall of the missing soars high over Omaha Beach, etched with names of lost World War II troops and the melancholy mystery of “comrades in arms whose resting place is known only to God.”

Along the wall, set in the American cemetery here on the Normandy cliffs, bronze rosettes mark soldiers whose remains have been found in the 65 years since the D-Day invasion. But for the vast number of missing Americans from the war — almost 73,500 — there are few rosettes and thousands of unanswered questions.

With time running out to crack the case of the missing soldiers, the United States fields teams of military researchers to search for the remains of World War II troops, but it has limited resources. So much of the detective work has fallen to amateur sleuths in Belgium, France and Germany who hunt for makeshift graves and the ghosts of war. Their tools are Google satellite photos, old-fashioned shoe-leather investigation and high-powered metal scanners that can detect a helmet 20 feet deep.

But most vital are the memories of elderly villagers who dig back deep into their past, some with sadness about old allies, some with nagging guilt about the killing of ancient enemies.

“We have maybe four or five years left, and then it’s over,” said Fabrice Corbin, founder of Génération Souvenir, a volunteer group with 30 members that has been searching for grave sites in the French countryside of Normandy for the past five years and has located about 20 remains. “The old witnesses and memories will vanish. And without witnesses who remember what happened, it will be very, very difficult.”…

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The RAF bombing raids in Normandy following the D-Day invasion were ‘close to a war crime’, a leading British historian has claimed.

Antony Beevor has singled out Bomber Command’s massive raids on the key city of Caen for particular criticism, describing the terrible suffering of French civilians trapped in the city as it was virtually destroyed. But veterans and other historians attacked his comments – made ahead of next week’s 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Beevor was accused of trying to generate publicity for his latest book, which covers the Normandy campaign.

Caen became a crucible of ferocious fighting during the campaign due to its vital strategic position controlling key roads and bridges at the eastern flank of the invasion beaches. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery hoped his troops would capture Caen on D-Day, June 6, 1944, but desperate German defenders repelled repeated attacks. It was almost two months before the city was safely in Allied hands by which time they had lost some 50,000 troops in the assault.

The RAF carried out two major bombing raids on Caen, once on D-Day and again a month later on July 7 – to open the way for a major assault. But a huge formation of British Lancaster and Halifax bombers missed virtually all the German positions on the edge of the city and instead reduced the centre to rubble, killing large numbers of French residents.

The number of deaths from both raids is disputed, but may have totalled as many as 5,000…

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The U.S. is leading an effort to stop environmental erosion from jeopardizing the clifftop of Pointe-du-Hoc on France’s Normandy coast, an area that has become hallowed ground for the American sacrifices of June 6, 1944, AFP reported.

New efforts are being extended to stabilize the cliff, on top of which sits a monument and a German bunker.

Decades of powerful tides, rain and wind shoveled deep into the rock forced the Pointe-du-Hoc memorial to be closed to the public in 2000 over concerns that it could collapse into the sea.

However, the memorial site should reopen to the public in 2011, as work is set to begin next year to stabilize the cliff.

Stephane Simonet, a historian at the Caen Peace Museum, called it a memorial to American heroism, as only 90 of the 225 Rangers survived attempting the insurmountable cliff.

Pointe-du-Hoc overlooks both Omaha and Utah beaches and was chosen by the Germans as the location for six artillery batteries that could resolutely repel any landing force.

It was the number one target of Operation Overlord for the American forces. Scaling the vertical cliffs in order to take Pointe-du-Hoc fell to the US 2nd Ranger Battalion, who were backed by naval and air bombardment.

US troops seized the cliff on June 6, 1944, where the German artillery bunker lay 32 feet from the cliff’s edge. Now it sits right next to the cliff’s steep drop. Crews will attempt to strengthen the base with small stakes and cement that will be sculpted and painted to blend into the cliffs.

Regis Leymarie, an official with the coastal conservation authority, said such a memorial site is extremely important for Americans, whose history is not as long as Europe’s. The D-Day landing beaches receive over 1 million visitors every year. The U.S. lost between 20,000 and 30,000 men between June and August 1944 in Normandy…

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The ghostly remains of five Nazi soldiers gunned down by the British on D-Day have been uncovered in northern France.

Still surrounded by their World War II German helmets and ammunition clips, they were found almost exactly 65 years to the day since Allied forces stormed ashore on June 6th 1944.

Scraps of camouflage smocks and tunic buttons also adorn the mangled skeletons, which were all hastily placed face down in a shallow grave ten feet long and four feet wide. All retained their ‘dog tags’ – small aluminum plates on a chain inscribed with name, rank and number – which would normally have been removed by their comrades and sent home to the Fatherland. Rifles and machine guns were all taken, possibly by British parachutists who had lost their own weapons during the night-time landings before D-Day.

‘The bodies weren’t covered before being buried which was unusual,’ said local council director Jean Deloges.

‘The presence of identity tags also suggests that they were buried extremely quickly by English or Canadian parachtists who were operating in the sector. All the Germans were clearly killed in the early hours of June 6th 1944.’ Tunic buttons have revealed that one of the men was an officer, with artifacts also including gas mask bags, gold teeth, and even a Berlin-made fountain pen.

The grave was found on May 8th by an amateur historian investigating the battlefield around Bavent, seven miles north east of Caen. The town is even closer to the fabled Pegasus Bridge, where the first troops to land on D-Day were from D-Company, 2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, in a 6th Airborne Division glider…

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As a nation, we are used to watching Hollywood distort history to suggest that some of Britain’s finest moments of the Second World War were achieved by Americans.

However, a US science writer has now claimed that Britain’s two most famous aircraft were not as significant in defeating the Luftwaffe as we might like to believe. Tim Palucka asserts that the British fighters were able to outmaneuver their German opponents because they were running on a special high-octane fuel created in the US.

He claims that the 100-octane fuel increased the Spitfire’s speed by 25mph at sea level and by 34mph at 10,000 feet.

This proved vital during dog fights over the Channel and the skies above England in 1940, Mr Palucka writes in the journal Invention And Technology.

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is inviting experts to challenge the claims.

RSC spokesman Brian Emsley said: “If it’s refutable we want it to be refuted. All we’ve got to go on is the one report.

“The Spitfire is a wonderful bit of British design, it’s an icon, so we approach this with trepidation, but the possibility should be aired…

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