D-Day

The 69th Anniversary of the D-Day landings and invasion on Normandy Beach in France, a operation that turned the tide of the entire war, has come and gone.

My apologies for this last D-Day post.  I had a wonderful post planned for D-Day thanks to the generosity of a reader who sent me a wonderful poster that was distributed to newspapers across the county.  The poster is of the five daily Peanuts comic stripes by Charles Schulz commemorating D-Day in 1994.  I had the poster framed and promptly broke the glass, so it is back at the framer.  So I am reposting the strips I used in 2011 again until I get my poster back:

Click to Enlarge and Read

You can also still follow the D-Day landings and invasion through the experience of 7 people who were there thanks to England's Channel 4, an experiment in real-time which should prove to be interesting. You can find it HERE 

Lastly, a documentary has been produced by Rick Beyer and has been showing on various PBS stations around the country called The Ghost Army.  This sounds like the stuff of YA WWII fiction, but it was the real deal.  This was a unit of hand picked artists, designers, ever a fashion designer - you remember Bill Blass, don't you?  These guys landed in France with rubber tanks and jeeps, sound effect records and all the other tricks they had dreamed up to fool the enemy.  And they did - more than 20 times throughout France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany.  

Check your local PBS stations to see if The Ghost Army is scheduled to be on TV.   If not, hopefully PBS will run it again online or on TV, it is so well worth watchers to see how their deceptions were created and utilized, as you can see from this trailer:

You can also read an interesting article in The Atlantic about the Ghost Army HERE  Those of you who read Connie Willis's brillant Blackout and All Clear, you might remember that she included bits about the rubber camaflogue tanks and trucks.

Please take a moment to remember those who landed in France on D-Day, those who survived and as well as those who didn't.   Each person played their own important role in the success of that invasion.