D-Day Article on National Geographic

[antarctic]

There is an excellent article by National Geographic about D-Day

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0206

Very touching. Also, I recommend reading the editor's message of this edition (June, 2002)

Antarctic

[Rankojin]

I am also a subscriber to Nation Geographic. An excellent article, and some truely touching pictures. One with Bill Kelley a survivor of D-day walking along Utah Beach with his grandson.
Another part that sticks out in my mind was Excercise Tiger ('practice landing along a part of Britian). After nine German torpedo boats attack US landing ships. I'll take a quote from the article (it's in my hands right now, so please excuse me if there are some spelling errors) "Many of the dead, they noticed, were floating head down, feet up, with their life belts inflated. No one hand told them that the life belts were to be worn under the armpits, not around the waist."
A compelling article, I suggest everyone read it.

[tracer]

My uncle Frank was one of the survivors of Excercise Tiger. Before he passed away in '92 he told me how he hung onto a piece of floating debris for 18 hours before being rescued, and mentioned the odd 'feet up' position of many of the bodies around him. Luckily for him the captain of one of the rescue boats disobeyed the order to return to port and chose to continue searching. The author of one of the books about the disaster (sorry, don't remember his name) came over from the UK to interview him in the late 80s.

After the war he contacted the families of some of the friends he lost that day in April 1944; to his astonishment he learned that the government had told them that they died in the Normandy landings two months later. One of the rumors about the cover-up is that many of the bodies were buried in the concrete of fortifications built on the English coast.

And those who drowned weren't the only casualties from Excercise Tiger. The time of the operation was changed, and one ship was not notified; its troops actually landed on the beach...just as the pre-landing bombardment arrived.

I figured that anyone who lived through a tragedy like that would take years to recover, if ever, but on June 6th he was driving his DUKW up Utah Beach. Guess they just made em tougher back then.