As the allied powers prepare to mark one of the most significant moments of the second world war this week, Allan Preston has been taking a look at how The Irish News marked D-Day.
ARCHIVE clippings from The Irish News have revealed how the dramatic events of the D-Day landings 80 years ago unfolded at home.
On the day of the ground invasion by allied forces on Tuesday, June 6 1944, the paper led with a St Peter’s Square address from Pope Pius XII, who expressed thanks that Rome was “saved from horrors of war by both belligerents” after the arrival of allied troops.
The US President Franklin D Roosevelt also warned that it would be “unwise” to assume capturing Rome meant Germany’s defeat, and “ultimate victory still lies some distance ahead”.
Meanwhile in Belfast, MP William John Stewart was due in court charged with attempting to defraud the Secretary of State for War of “large sums of money” over war contracts.
Possibly referring to the thousands of US troops passing through Northern Ireland to France, a Guinness advert in the paper is dedicated “to our American friends”.
The front page on June 7 reports “Allies’ success in initial landings in France” and that “the first day of the Allied assault on Hitler’s Western ‘Wall’ has gone well”.
“The Allied troops went in at dawn yesterday under the greatest air umbrella in history and got on to the beaches without the coastal defences proving nearly as effective as was expected.
“The Luftwaffe made only 50 sorties in reply to the Allies’ devastating air blow, in which over 10,000 bombs were hurled by the RAF at the German defences between midnight and 8am.”
Airborne troops then engaged “in the biggest parachute descent in military history” with minimal losses reported.
A report from the House of Commons that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was met with “bursts of cheering” when he announced “in solemn, measured tones, but with a confident note in his voice” that landings had begun.
Broadcasting in exile, the leader of the free French forces, General Charles De Gaulle, said: “The supreme battle has begun. After so much struggle, fury, suffering, this is the decisive blow, the battle of France and France’s battle.
“France, submerged for four years , but not reduced, not vanquished, stands up to take her part in this offensive. For the sons of France, wherever or whoever they may be, there is a simple and sacred duty – to fight with all the means at their disposal. The enemy must be destroyed.”
An editorial from The Irish News states: “The war accordingly enters what may well be its final phase.
“Undoubtedly, it will be its fiercest. French battlegrounds have been the scene of bloody and bitter fights.
“The trial of strength between the Allies and the Germans will add to the annals of warfare its most remarkable chapter.
“The event, which stirs the entire world, will demand a vast sacrifice, and the men who take part in it merit not only a tribute but a prayer.”
Catholic military chaplains from the British and United States forces also met in Belfast’s St Kevin’s Church, expressing thanks for the liberation of Rome and the operations in Europe “which future generations would look back on as one of the turning points of history, operations in which many chaplains would be called upon to sacrifice their lives in this sphere of priestly duties to which this war had unhappily called them, hundreds of thousands of miles away from their countries, their families, or their religious houses.”
By Saturday, June 10, Eamon De Valera was re-elected as Taoiseach while supreme commander of the Allied Force, Dwight D Eisenhower, told the French their “day of liberation has dawned”.
War correspondent Henry Gorrell reports “I have never witnessed such savage fighting” as in the drop zone for airborne troops, with no time to bury the dead.
Passing through two French towns taken by house-to-house grenade and bayonet fighting, he said that German bodies lay where they were fallen.
“Nevertheless there were still French civilians in the doorways, including women and children.
“Some of the latter were toying with clips of machine-gun bullets and pieces of shrapnel.”
Elsewhere, it was reported that work had commenced in Derry to prepare four large camps in preparation for around 3,000 French evacuees from the fighting zones in Normandy.
The unused camps had been constructed as part of civil defence arrangements in Derry, to accommodate citizens who might be rendered homeless as a result of air raids.
By Monday June 12, it was reported that after a “desperate battle around Bayeux,” the Germans “have completely lost their chance to throw the Allies back into the sea”.
On the Eastern front, Russian leader Joseph Stalin announced “the first blow of the Red Army’s expected summer offensive” landed in Finland.
Other headlines declare “France rising against the Germans” while in an attempted show of strength, German radio announced that thousands of Allied prisoners were to be “marched through Paris”.
