Beschloss tweet: D-Day paratroopers on way to launch invasion, 75 years ago:

[Dennis Donovan]

Link to tweet

Michael Beschloss ✔
@BeschlossDC
D-Day paratroopers on way to launch invasion, 75 years ago:


9:30 PM - Jun 5, 2019

[RT Atlanta]

1. chills looking at that pic

H/T to those young men and the sacrifices they made for the world!

[Dennis Donovan]

2. Imagine yourself in a C-47, loaded with gear that was nearly 50% of your body weight

...it's night, and you have to jump from the C-47 into darkness.

[mitch96]

3. Hard to think my father was LOCKED in the engine room during bombardment..

He was an engineer on board the USS Quincy bombarding the Normandy beach head. They locked the engine room so no body would "chicken out" as the old mans said. They also gave him a .45 cal pistol and he had orders to shoot anyone who ran.. YIKES!!
I saw a photo of the Quincy gettin shelled from the beach... Two big splashes on either side of the stern..... where the engine room was.. IF any one of those hit the stern........
I might not be here...... spooky.
m

[First Speaker]

4. That's one of the very unromantic, and little known, realities of war...

...that sometimes, you have to threaten your own men to keep them in the line. The Russians had whole armies called "blocking units", just for this purpose, and during the war sometimes the Red Army troops would attack *them* instead of the Germans. My dad was a tailgunner on a B-17, and the whole crew knew that the captain had orders to make sure no one hit the silk without permission...