Brooke S Blades - The Americans on D-Day & in Normandy

IMAGES OF WAR

The Americans On D-Day & In Normandy

RARE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM WARTIME ARCHIVES

Brooke Blades

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by

PEN & SWORD MILITARY

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

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Copyright Brooke S Blades, 2019

ISBN 978-1-52674-396-1

eISBN 978-1-52674-397-8

Mobi ISBN 978-1-52674-398-5

The right of Brooke S Blades to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

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N o research is undertaken without the assistance of others nor is any writing emerging from that research the sole product of one person. It is therefore a sincere pleasure to express my appreciation to the friends, former colleagues and archives staff who have been instrumental in the preparation of this volume.

Rick Wherley gave me many books. Rick has always been eager to talk about Normandy and discuss the past as if it was the present. Phil Pendleton participated in early concept discussions of a Normandy study. John Lawrence and Richard Baublitz provided encouragement along the way; John kindly donated some important recent literature to the cause. Jason Vendetti showed sustained interest and enabled Julie Cressman to produce most of the maps in the volume. Frank Dunsmore produced another map and was always willing to see the latest photographs from the National Archives. To Georges Augustins and Jehanne Fblot-Augustins, many thanks for their research assistance and friendship.

Henry Wilson at Pen & Sword Books Ltd was an early supporter of this volume and the concept of combining thematic photographic essays with text. I thank him for his pleasant and professional manner. Many hands at Pen & Sword were involved in the production of this volume, particularly those belonging to Barnaby Blacker, Katie Eaton, Lori Jones and Matt Jones.

Lieutenant Colonel Michael Perry (ret.), the executive director of the Army Heritage Center Foundation in Carlisle, has a deeply personal interest in the D-Day landings. Mike sustained the research in numerous ways, including providing access to his fathers papers and photographs. Sarah Pendleton and Lori Wheeler at the Military History Institute Library in Carlisle provided assistance with images from the S.L.A. Marshall Collection. Bernard Lebrec in Normandy and Robert Giannini and Patricia Daley Giannini in Philadelphia were very kind to donate photographs.

Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc., used with permission. Magnum Photos, New York, granted permission as follows: Robert Capa ( International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos). Permission was obtained from the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz for several Wehrmacht images from Normandy.

Veterans have agreed over the years to talk about Normandy. I thank them for what they did then and were willing to share later: John Cotter, Henry Ferri, Peter Munger and a British gentleman I knew only as Jack.

This book would quite simply not have been possible without the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Many staff provided assistance but a few stood out and must be mentioned: Andrew Knight in Cartography, and Sharon Culley, Holly Reed and Kaitlyn Crain Enriquez in Still Pictures.

My wife Meg Bleecker Blades and daughter Emma Blades provided much encouragement and were even willing to undertake thankless proofreading tasks.They did not seem to mind my absence on research trips including one in France and Holland. As always, their love and support sustain me.

This book is dedicated to my parents Winnie and Al Blades. My mother remembered the war as a time when she worked at the local telephone switchboard and worried about her brother in the Navy. She always wanted me to inquire into the past and I hope these efforts would have pleased her. My father served in the Pacific with the 1906th Engineer Aviation Battalion in New Guinea, Leyte and Okinawa.Little mention was made of the 50th anniversary of the Second World War before the D-Day commemorations in 1994. As a consequence, my father felt what they did in the Pacific perhaps did not matter. It did, Dad.

Strafford, Pennsylvania

April 2018

* * *

Permission to publish excerpts was kindly granted by the following:

Excerpt from Crusade in Europe by Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1948 by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of theKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Matthew Daley interview, Oral History Collection, Special Collections & Archives, Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, Florida.

Cole Kingseed, From Omaha Beach to Dawson's Ridge: The Combat Journal of Captain Joe Dawson, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland.

Ed Wright letters in Wendell Wilkie Papers, Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

W hat is the enduring appeal of Normandy in the study of the Second World War? D-Day and the Normandy campaign possess significance beyond the obvious beginning of the end for Nazi Germany. The late John Keegan recognized that military behaviours cannot be comprehended without reference to the broader cultural contexts that give rise to them. He understood the limitations in military history and the contributions made by S.L.A. Marshall in improving those historical narratives. Interviews conducted in Normandy both led to and in turn reinforced interpretations reflected in Marshalls later writings.

Omaha Beach and other Normandy locations are sacred places to many today. The D-Day beaches were in large measure the primary gateways, the low doors in the Atlantic Wall that led, through heroism, suffering and sacrifice, to the liberation of Western Europe. To modern eyes, the landscapes associated with those events are memorialized and even sanitized to a point where the reality of those awful days in the summer of 1944 is increasingly hard to visualize. Even more regrettably, the people who occupied those landscapes and experienced those days have largely faded in person and public memory.