Airborne troops led the D-Day landings in a combined parachute and glider assault, to throw a net of protection around the Normandy beaches, where a massive invasion force would sweep ashore and advance into Europe.
Among their initial objectives, the British airborne units were to destroy a German gun battery that threatened the lives of seaborne troops, and protect the left flank of the sea assault by seizing strategic points, which would prevent the enemy from reaching the beaches.
Preparations had been going on for three years prior to the invasion of Normandy, with new roles being created and units formed, including the 6th Airborne Division on May 18, 1943. The number ‘six’ being chosen to hoodwink the enemy and fool them into believing that Britain already had five airborne divisions, when in fact it had just two, the lst and 6th, under General Browning.
Operation Overlord ‘D-Day’ on June 6, 1944, involved the massed troops of two Allied armies pouring into France to drive the Germans out of the country, after the 6th Airborne division had dropped and captured key points, including a heavily fortified gun battery.
The division, which had been bom in 1943, was under the command of General Gale, and included glider and parachute troops from many different regiments, all wearing the distinctive red beret of airborne forces.
There were now ten glider squadrons operating under the control of No. 38 group RAF, and today, at the end of the old runway at Harwell, now the Atomic Research Establishment, a memorial marks the spot where the first gliders left for D-Day.
Bad weather had delayed the invasion by 24 hours, but late on the night of June 5, the force of Dakotas and Horsa gliders towed by RAF bombers took off for the invasion of Normandy.
First in were the pathfinders of 22nd Independent Parachute company, with Lt De La Tour being the first man on the ground. They were tasked to mark the drop zone and guide the parachute and glider units in using special Eureka beacons.
Few were dropped accurately, as the Germans had flooded the low-lying ground around the Orne and Dives rivers, destroying many identifying features which had been given to pilots as ‘markers’ during the intense pre-flight brief.
Unit planning had been very detailed, especially by the 9 Para, who had been tasked to silence the Merville gun battery before the landings started. If they didn’t succeed they would be shelled themselves, by the warship HMS Arethusa.
The huge guns at Merville were just miles from the beaches of Sword, Juno and Gold, where the seaborne assault was to take place and posed the greatest threat to the invasion. Buried under 12ft-thick concrete, the four 75mm guns had the capability to engage Royal Navy warships out at sea and sink landing craft heading for the beaches.
RAF bombers had tried several times to destroy the concrete bunkers at Merville, but their precision bombing made no impression; now the task had been given to the Paras.
The 6th Airborne division was 8,500 strong and included the 3rd and 5th Parachute Brigades, as well as the 6th Air Landing Brigade of glider borne troops, who had been training at Netheravon. Their role was to seize or destroy several bridges over two rivers and the Caen canal, silence enemy positions in the area and secure the eastern flank of the beaches. Here the British Second Army was to come ashore, just a few hours later.
The 3rd Parachute Brigade had to land in the very heart of the enemy’s defences and destroy the Troarn, Varaville, Robehomme and Bures bridges across the Dives river, while its 9th battalion hit Merville. At the same time, their colleagues in the 5th Parachute Brigade were given a similar task and briefed to hold the bridges north of the village of Ranville spanning the River Orne and the Caen canal, as well as preparing a landing zone for the glider troops.
More than 200 gliders were towed up into the skies of Britain during the night of June 5, along with a huge force of Dakota aircraft heading for what should have been, the most planned military action of the war.
Flak started to hit the aircraft and as pilots took avoiding action weaving across the sky, some Paras already hooked up and waiting to jump, were tossed out of the doors.
The entire force of 9 Para had been dropped off their DZ and Lt Col Otway could only assemble 150 men to commence his attack. He ordered his men to paint a skull and crossbones on the chest of their smocks as an identifying mark to recognise each other in the heat of the battle, which along with their blackened faces and helmets, served to scare the Germans.
After more of the battalion had arrived, one of the unit’s officers sounded his hunting horn to start the assault on one of the most vital features of D-Day.
Para casualties were very heavy, but the Germans surrendered. Then just half an hour before the Navy were to start shelling the Merville guns, Otway fired a yellow flare to signal his unit’s success.
Glider troops had been ordered to capture Pegasus bridge, which they did despite heavy enemy fire and constant counter attacks, which lasted days.
Arthur Brock, a Royal Engineer serving with Airborne Forces, was in one of three gliders which landed directly in the area of the bridge and owes his life to his Army pay book.
He was sent in to deal with mines, but instead, found himself in the thick of the fighting. He was showered by shrapnel from a shell blast, sending splinters of metal flying into his chest, but luckily, not him. His Army pay book took the blast and saved his life. ‘I was very lucky, but others weren’t so fortunate. The shelling went on for hours, I will never forget it, or my pals.’
Just four days after D-Day, the Germans attempted to push through the divisional area at Breville. A battle raged for hours and the enemy lost 200 dead and 150 prisoners to 13 Para, but still maintained their position, threatening to break through to the invasion beaches.
In the days that followed, 153 Infantry Brigade launched an assault on Breville, but were beaten off, suffering heavy casualties.
On June 12, the Germans launched two major attacks with armour support on 9 Para. The Battalion held its ground and beat off the assault, but by the end of the day, the unit was reduced to just 200 men.
Finally 12 Para with a company of 12 Devons and 22 Independent Parachute Company, were ordered to capture the village of Breville, in order to secure the division’s sector, in defence of the beach head.
At a cost of 141 men, Breville was back in Allied possession and proved to be one of the most important battles of the invasion. Had it been lost the beaches could have been attacked and the war lost.
Nowegian Virus
virus_norway.txt
DEAR RECEIVER,
You have just received a Norwegian virus. Since we are not so technologically advanced in Norway, this is a MANUAL virus. Please delete all the files on your hard disk yourself and send this mail to everyone you know. Thank you very much for helping me.
Ole Hacker
I gave Citrix GoToMeeting a
I gave Citrix GoToMeeting a quick try this morning and it works rather good. Simply it is a shared presentation tool where the whole desktop is shared to all receivers. No audio, no video.
The user interface was really nice. Nice colours. Nice buttons for inviting users and sharing control. The shared desktop was scaled nicely on the receiving side. I got a 86% scaling and it looked very good. The update could have been a bit snappier though.
The client was installed via Java and I installed it and hosted a quick meeting within 3 minutes.
Regarding control, one or several other users could control the shared desktop. As far as I could tell only one desktop could be shared at one time though.
Seems to be a Windows only solution. MacOSX just gave an error “Your Operating System Is Not Supported”.
A simple shared deskstop/presentation tool that really seems to do the job.
Nick Berg
I just watched the beheading of Nick Berg. Sigh….. I shouldn’t have. I am stunned and I don’t know what to say…
Home Alone
I am home alone again. Johanna was going to her school in Borås and Tovah tagged along. She will be staying her first night without either mother or father, but with Johanna’s mother.
I have been working all day and will work most of the time when I am alone so I can spend more time with the family when they get back.
Got my second fan in Orkut today. Patrik Fältström!! My first is Jeff Pulver. I guess I have to start becoming a fan myself 🙂
A bit over a week ago the experts regarding my associate professorship responded and signed off on the scientific part (i.e. they both approved it). One of them though, questioned my pedagogic skills and I had to submit evidence of that I am a good teacher. So I produced a 22 page document for them. I hope they will respond immediately so a decision can be made by the next faculty board meeting at the end of May. If not, then there won’t be any decision until after the summer. This whole procedure started at the end of 2002 :-/ We really have a speedy organization.
Highest Bandwidth?
“The best information environments will take advantage of the ability of IT to overcome geography but will also acknowledge that the highest bandwidth network of all is found between the water fountain and the coffee machine.”
– Tom Davenport
Thing things things to do
I am sitting here at the University listening to Kåre talk about Media Technology. He is very good and is much more interested in the undergraduate related issues than I am.
Last week the whole division went to Piteå for a 3 day retreat. It included many good discussions, bathing, a lot of beer and too little sleep. During some discussion the following popped into my head:
Sometime we forget where we come from. Why do we educate people into a dedicated role instead on giving them a knowledge base, i.e. giving our students a knowledge area to work with in the future?
Tuesday we spent at the Academic Music Center in Piteå where we among other things got a crash course in how to create a news program. I have a taped version of it and will make it available later. It was fun fun fun 🙂
Got back and had 1.5 hectic days including a presentation about E-Media on the net with the subtitle: “Do we need physical libraries”. It was basically only library people listening, but it was a very very fun presentation to create and present. My conclusion is that physical libraries are no longer needed, but instead information meeting places are needed and the librarians will be replaced by information diggers.
After the presentation I was as always “over pepped” and I decided that I had worked enough that week and I threw a spontaneous BBQ party. SUMMER time. I was really nice just to kick back and relax.
During Saturday we started building the porch on the front of the house. We went and ordered all the timber we needed and it got delivered today. More later… Anyhow during the afternoon I started digging and moved all the old stone plates (about 1000KG of plates and the same amount of sand). The digging continued over Sunday.
A fun thing is all this digging and building makes me full of energy.
Today, all the timber arrived from Beijers and of course 10 minutes after it arrived it started raining so I had to “run” with it all into the garage. During the morning I was called into a interview with a major Swedish newspaper. It was of course done over the net and we will see if he prints anything. Today has been very hectic day and I haven’t had much time to think and actually do anything.
Damn, the seats in the A117 room are bad. I have been sitting down 45 minutes and it already hurts. Is this what my students have to bear with ?
Tearing down stuff is fun!
Yesterday we cleaned out the garage and suddenly we can fit our bikes in there without having to use a shoehorn. We threw away tons of stuff. It was hard work but you feel so good afterwards. During the coming week is “odd garbage week”, i.e. they come a fetch all the garbage you cannot throw away normally. The problem is that we have sooooo much garbage standing next to the street right now. We’ll see if they take anything at all.
Today we started preparing for the new porch on the front side of the house. I removed about 1/3 of the stoneplates and then tore down the old porch. We left the small deck for now. It is fun causing mayhem with a chainsaw. Unfortunately it broke down when I was cutting all the big pieces into smaller ones. 🙁 Need to get some spare parts (a tiny metal peace that holds the chain got bent.).
It is fun to tear down stuff!! 🙂
Tomorrow I am off for a three day division trip to Piteå for creative discussions, bathing, gocart and tons of good food!!! I might be online. We’ll see….
Have fun, Hakuna Matata!
IP telephony day
I spent the day at Arlanda, Stockholm. Went down yesterday evening and spent the night at Arlandia Hotel. My favorite hotel at Arlanda. The venue was an IP-telephony day arranged by SUNET with the overall goal to spread knowledge about IP-telephony within goverment departments around Sweden. Lund and Stockholm are those that has gotten the furtherst but they have chosen very different ways. Lund are replacing all old phones with IP-phone services immediately while Stockholm take a more relaxed approach introducing it is time goes.
Overall the presentation were good and I personally learned more about ENUM but besides that it was mostly valuable to meet people and get the puls (which was mostly dead outside Lund and Stockholm :). The IP-telephony “boss” at LTU was there and it looked like he was leaning towards just keep expaning the MD110 with H.323 services. I obviously want SIP based services as well as that is much more expandable and I am very sure we will see many more SIP based services in the future.
One reflection from today is that there is still soooo much religion and strong feelings involved within the computer geek division. Do they really think it will make things move faster in the direction they want? Yes; I wrote they as I don’t really se myself as part of that group. At least I think I am tiny bit more diplomatic.
I am sitting on the airplane back right now as I must say that it was rather fun to get out of Luleå. Even if it only was for a day at Arlanda. I feel pepped.
A few seats away a young man (that makes me sound sooo old 🙂 is reading a magazine about tatoos and he just keep staring at those pictures. People are strange, in a strange world.
Next friday (May 7 13.00) I will be giving a presentation of e-media and the need for physical libraries. It is part of the libraries 10 year anniversary in their new building and I will be the final speaker. I wonder what my conclusion will be and if they will be happy with it 😉 Catch the presentation if you can!! It is only about 20-30 minutes!
Yesterday Tovah learned to ride her new 12″ bike. She rode on her own around the block. She is getting soooo big. One can hold real conversations with her know and she knows most of the letters in the alphabet. She can do basic addition (like 3+6).
A lot of text deleted… Another heavy issue is troubeling me right now but due to its sensitive character I cannot write about it here. More later…
Summer is almost here. All the trees that have been cut down behind my house makes huge difference. Now we have a huge empty area there which allows for one of my favorite things, barbequing 🙂 That makes me happy.
Talking about happy. I am trying to be as happy as possible (no shit sherlock) but it goes very much up and down. I have rather much been out of the “boss-loop” during the winter/spring and I have kept my distance from heavy burdens but as everything has a bad side so does that. The bad side is that I get more sensitive in bad situations. Hypothosys: The more bad situations you get into the the less negative impact each situation make on you. The key issue here is obviously to try to make bad situations into good situations, basically by talking with the person/s involved. Some situations you cannot always make any difference in and then you just have to live with it and keep working forward. Another important thing is not to plan to far ahead in life. E.g. me and Kåre today discussed recruiment issues that won’t happen until earliest one year from now and that feels to me like a good thing to “ignore” for another 6 months or so.
I have been spending some time in Orkut and a couple of days ago I got my first fan. Steve Pulver from Pulver Innovations. COOL 🙂 I always get impressed when “big” people notice me 🙂
Landing soon and I better get back to answering emails (sigh).
Very interesting write up about Google!
Very interesting write up about Google! Read it!!