Remembering D-Day

I know I am a few days late in remembering D-Day but I thought it was appropriate considering that my grandfather, Jack, arrived on the shores of Normandy a few days after the main invasion. He was part of the clean up crew. I guess that's one of the reasons he survived the war---the sheer luck of avoiding the most dangerous part of the D-Day Invasion.

My late grandfather, Hank, was an aerial photographer in the United States Air Corps in England and France. I forgot what part he played in D-Day, but anyways one of his favorite war stories to tell was how he dated the mayor of Vert-le-Grand's daughter, André LeBlanc and how her dad sent her little brother to chaperone them. I wish we had recorded all his war stories for posterity before he passed on.

I had other relatives that served during World War II as well including a Great-Uncle that was stationed at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7th. He never liked to talk about Pearl Harbor up to his passing.

Anyways, world history should never be forgotten and world history was certainly made on that day---June 6, 1944.


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History Tidbits

Ancient Shoe Soles Found in Trash Pile

By Robert Roy Britt, LiveScience
posted: 8 DAYS 6 HOURS AGOcomments: 287filed under: Science News, World NewsPrintShareText SizeAAASkip over this content

(March 8) - A batch of well-preserved shoe soles have been found in an ancient trash dump in Lyon, France. They date from the 13th to the 18th centuries.
Older shoes have been found, including one from 2,000 years ago discovered in 2005 in a hollow tree trunk in southwest England. Sandals from 10,000 years ago were found in a cave in Oregon and are said to be the oldest footware ever found.

Humans began wearing shoes about 40,000 years ago, a study last year revealed.
The newfound leather soles, buried in mud, will improve understanding of how leather can be preserved and help scientists restore other leather artifacts, the discoverers said.
Michel Bardet and colleagues at the French Atomic Energy Commission detailed the findings in the American Chemical Society journal Analytical Chemistry.

Bardet explained that leather consists of collagen, a tough protein that is in human bones, too, and which can remain intact hundreds of thousands of years under ideal conditions — such as the oxygen-deprived environment in the mud. An examination of the soles found that tannin, which helps to preserve leather, had been washed out and replaced by iron oxides that leached into the leather from surrounding soil and helped preserve the soles in the absence of the tannins.
Bardet has studied ancient wood artifacts, too.

"One thing that was interesting for us ... is that both [wood and leather] are what we call 'waterlogged' materials. It's organic matter full of water," he said. "Generally, when we are working on wood found in similar conditions, the wood is in very poor condition.... Most of the cellulose has been destroyed. In the case of leather, the material seems to be in better preservation."

© Imaginova Corp. All rights reserved.
2009-03-08 12:56:33

Man Finds Images of D-Day Rehearsals
AOL
posted: 5 DAYS 3 HOURS AGOcomments: 277filed under: National News, World NewsPrintShareText SizeAAA

(March 9) - In what's turned out to be a fascinating discovery, an amateur historian has unearthed footage of American and British troops practicing for D-Day. The footage, images of which can be seen below, shows the troops in what are essentially rehearsals for the invasion of the beaches in Normandy, France, during World War II.
The footage was shot between October 1943 and June 1944 along beaches in the county of Devon, Britain, as reported by The Daily Mail of London.
Tony Koorlander, a former technical coordinator for the BBC, found the collection of 10-minute reels in a national archive in Baltimore, Md., in February. Koorlander was researching the wartime connection of his hometown of Bideford in Devon. "It's like going back and living the experience," Koorlander said in a statement.

2009 AOL LLC. All Rights Reserved.
2009-03-09 15:11:20

Imagine Finding This In Your Parents' Or Grandparents' House

Blueprints Found for Auschwitz Camp

By Erik Kirschbaum, Reuters
posted: 1 DAY 18 HOURS AGOcomments: 1141filed under: World News


BERLIN (Nov. 10) – The original construction plans believed used for a major expansion of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in 1941 have been found in a Berlin flat, Germany's Bild newspaper reported on Saturday.
The daily printed three architect's drawings on yellowing paper from the batch of 28 pages of blueprints it obtained. One has an 11.66 meter by 11.20 meter room marked "Gaskammer" (gas chamber) that was part of a "delousing facility."

No one from the federal government's archives was immediately available for comment on the authenticity or importance of the documents.
The plans, published ahead of the 70th anniversary of the "Kristallnacht" or the Nazi pogrom that was a harbinger of the Holocaust, also include a crematorium and a "L. Keller" -- an abbreviation for "Leichenkeller" or corpse cellar.
A drawing of the building for Auschwitz's main gate was also found in the documents that Bild said were believed to have been discovered when a Berlin flat was cleaned out.
The mass-circulation newspaper quoted Hans-Dieter Kreikamp, head of the federal archives office in Berlin, as saying the blueprints offered "authentic evidence of the systematically planned genocide of European Jews."
There were mass killings of about one million Jews before the Nazi's "Final Solution" was formulated in late 1941. The decision to kill Europe's 11 million Jews was made at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942.

A copy of the minutes, known as the "Wannsee Protocol," is one of the most important documents from the war.
The newly found Auschwitz blueprints are dated October 23 1941 and could offer historians earlier evidence of Nazi plans to kill Jews on a mass scale, Bild said.
"These documents reveal that everyone who had even anything remotely to do with the planning and construction of the concentration camp must have know that people were to be gassed to death in assembly-line fashion," Bild wrote.
"The documents refute once and for all claims by those who deny the Holocaust even took place," it added.

The concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland was the largest -- at least 1.1 million Jews were killed there.
Auschwitz I was set up in May 1940 in an old Polish army barracks. The first victims were gassed in September 1941. Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, opened in October 1941. Four large gas chambers were added to the camp in January 1942.
Copyright 2008, Reuters
2008-11-10 16:43:06