![]() Pyle was not a propagandist, but his columns seemed to offer the reader an unspoken agreement that they would not have to look too closely at the deaths, blood and corpses that are the reality of battle. Before D-Day, Pyle’s dispatches from the front were full of gritty details of the troops’ daily struggles but served up with healthy doses of optimism and a reliable habit of looking away from the more horrifying aspects of war. What Pyle witnessed on the Normandy coast triggered a sort of journalistic conversion for him: Soon his readers - a broad section of the American public - were digesting columns that brought them more of the war’s pain, costs and losses. ![]() In June 1944, Ernie Pyle, a 43-year-old journalist from rural Indiana, was as ubiquitous in the everyday lives of millions of Americans as Walter Cronkite would be during the Vietnam War. It also changed the way America’s most famous and beloved war correspondent reported what he saw. That victory was a decisive leap toward defeating Hitler’s Germany and winning the Second World War. The 1944 Battle of Normandy from the D-Day landings on 6 June through to the encirclement of the German army at Falaise on 21 August was one of the pivotal events of the Second World War and the scene of some of Canadas greatest feats of arms. On 1 May, the 29th Indian Brigade (including 1/6th Gurkha Rifles) landed, took and secured Sari Bair above the landing beaches and was joined by 1/5th Gurkha Rifles and 2/10th Gurkha Rifles the Zion Mule. In the biggest and most complicated amphibious operation in military history, it wasn’t bombs, artillery or tanks that overwhelmed the Germans it was men - many of them boys, really - slogging up the beaches and crawling over the corpses of their friends that won the Allies a toehold at the western edge of Europe. The division landed on five beaches in an arc about the tip of the peninsula, named 'S', 'V', 'W'', 'X' and 'Y' Beaches from east to west. By the end of the day, the beaches had been secured and the heaviest fighting had moved at least a mile inland. The ensuing slaughter was merciless.īut Allied troops kept landing, wave after wave, and by midday they had crossed the 300 yards of sandy killing ground, scaled the bluffs and overpowered the German defenses. The landing ramps slapped down into the surf, and a catastrophic hail of gunfire erupted from the bluffs. ![]() Concentrated in concrete pill boxes, nearly 2,000 German defenders lay in wait. They waited, like trapped mice, barely daring to breathe.Ī blanket of smoke hid the heavily defended bluffs above the strip of sand code-named Omaha Beach. Exercise Tiger, or Operation Tiger, was one of a series of large-scale rehearsals for the D-Day invasion of Normandy, which took place in April 1944 on Slapton Sands in Devon. ![]() The flesh under the men’s sea-soaked uniforms prickled. As the landing craft drew close to shore, the deafening roar stopped, quickly replaced by German artillery rounds crashing into the water all around them. Their senses were soon choked with the smells of wet canvas gear, seawater and acrid clouds of powder from the huge naval guns firing just over their heads. In the predawn darkness of June 6, 1944, thousands of American soldiers crawled down swaying cargo nets and thudded into steel landing craft bound for the Normandy coast. Most of the men in the first wave never stood a chance. ![]()
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