Lesser known facts about D-Day: Erotic adventure and inflatable tanks

On June 1944, 150, more than XNUMX Allied soldiers marched towards the northern French coast, thus beginning the liberation of Europe from Nazism. D-Day is an event that was a turning point in the Second World War, and these are five lesser-known facts about that historical event, Hina agency reports.

Erotic adventure

"When the Germans came, we told the men to hide. When the Americans arrived, we had to hide the women." This French joke refers to the "erotic adventure" that the US military promised soldiers who went to France, writes historian Mary Louise Roberts in the book "What Soldiers Do: Sex and American Soldiers in World War II France."

American military propaganda depicted France "as a big brothel with 40 million hedonists".

Readers of the American military magazine "Stars And Stripes" were able to learn the French phrases for "You are very beautiful", "I am not married" and "Are your parents at home?". In German, however, they could only learn how to say "No cigarettes" or "Surrender!".

American promiscuity sparked outrage among local residents in towns such as L'Avre and Reims, where soldiers had sex "in parks, cemeteries, streets and abandoned buildings."

More than 150 American soldiers have been convicted of rape. Most of them were black, which caused outrage among French civilians at "American racial injustice".

Fear of defeat

As D-Day approached, the Allies increasingly feared defeat. Allied commander and future US president Dwight Eisenhower wrote a statement on June 5 in which he wrote that in the event of failure, "the blame lies solely with him."

"My decision to attack at that time and place was based on the best information available. The soldiers, on the ground, in the air and at sea, served with courage and loyalty as their duty called them," Eisenhower wrote in advance.

Allied forces quickly gained control of Utah, Gold, Juneau, and Sword beaches. But on Omaha, the fifth beach, there were many victims, so it earned a sad nickname - bloody Omaha. The high cliffs at Omaha gave the Germans an advantage.

Part of the 2.500 American victims on that beach died from enemy fire, and part of them drowned. Some paratroopers also drowned because the heavy equipment, weighing 30 to 40 kilograms, dragged them underwater in the deep swamps in the background.

Inflatable tanks

"Fake news" is a modern phenomenon, but the British Army designed and carried out an operation to deceive the Germans into thinking that the Allies were planning to attack in Scandinavia and then land in the area around Calais, not in Normandy.

Inflatable tanks were placed on the British coast opposite Calais, and metal decoys were used to make it appear to German radars that a huge army was preparing to land near the French city.

The fake radio messages were planted by the German intelligence service. Even as D-Day began, the Germans believed that a second wave of attacks was headed for Calais. Hitler only subsequently ordered the German forces to be moved from there to the Normandy front.

Comanches

Creating coded messages and decoding them would take too much time during the landings, and would be picked up very quickly by Germans on the same wavelengths. The Americans therefore used the Indians, especially the Comanches, who spoke in their own terminology, unknown to the Germans, to convey messages.

John Parker, the son of one of Simmons Parker's code talkers, remembers his father telling him that the "crazy white man" was Hitler and the "pregnant bird" was the bomber.

Invasion in Indonesia

Britain's Royal Mail apologized six months ago after releasing a commemorative postage stamp to mark the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

On that stamp, instead of landing in Normandy, the American landing in Indonesia, then Dutch New Guinea, was shown.