D-Day 6.6.1944 Page #8

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or whether a second,

much larger invasion was still to come.

We intercepted a German intelligence

message sent to all senior staff.

They bought every word you said.

The German High Command was still

expecting an invasion at Pas-de-Calais

until September 1944.

The double agent Juan Pujol,

codenamed Garbo,

worked for British Intelligence

until the end of the war.

In 1949, he faked his own death

and went to live in Venezuela.

In July 1944, Rommel was implicated

in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

He was threatened with a trial for treason

and forced to take his own life.

Hans Speidel escaped

implication in the plot.

He went on to become Commander-in-Chief

of Allied land forces for NATO in 1957.

General Eisenhower returned

to the United States in 1945

where he became Army Chief of Staff.

He went on to become twice

President of the United States.

Of the men of the 9th Parachute Battalion

who landed with

Lieutenant-Colonel Terence Otway,

50 were lost in the capture

of the battery at Merville.

Another 190 remain unaccounted

for to this day.

Frequently I think about the men.

They knew it was possible that

they'd have to sacrifice their lives

for the men coming across the beach.

I knew very well

that those men would not let me down.

The men of the King's

Shropshire Light Infantry

were engaged in bitter fighting

at Lebisey Ridge for 30 days.

The Allies finally succeeded in

liberating the city of Caen on July 19th.

Those of us survived are pretty selfish.

It's a dirty, filthy game, war.

You miss your colleagues.

There's no question about that.

Yeah, it is sad. It is sad.

As the days went on,

we thought to ourselves,

a few days ago, you were just lads.

You hadn't been out of school very long.

And now you've become a man when

you've gone through all this nightmare.

It is a nightmare, of course.

Absolute nightmare.

18-year-old Franz Gockel was

one of only two men in his platoon

who survived the fighting

on Omaha Beach.

I've told people

I was praying a lot during the attack.

And one of the Americans

I'm now friends with today said,

We were also praying.

We were praying

and killing each other at the same time.

Robert Capa's photographs were published

in "Life" magazine on June 19th, 1944.

He had already returned

to the beaches of Normandy.

He was killed by a landmine ten years

later whilst on assignment in Vietnam.

The red cross made by Andr Heintz

outside the city hospital of Caen

was spotted by Allied aircraft.

The hospital and the cathedral

were the only two large buildings

that escaped destruction.

they came across a cellar

where they found a man

who had died of suffocation

because he had been trapped there

and nobody had ever realized

that he was there.

And with a candle

he had managed to write a few notes,

and the last thing he had written was,

It's terrible to know

that I am going to die

because I have been expecting

the liberation for so long,

but since I know that because of my death

other people will be liberated...

And he ended,

"Long live France! Long live the Allies!"

Boris J.

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