Covering the Day of Days
Seventy-seven years after Allied troops landed in Normandy, we run through the timeline of how D-Day news coverage unfolded on June 6, 1944.
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Guy Byam sought danger until the end
After surviving a German attack that killed most of his Royal Navy shipmates, Guy Byam arrived by parachute to cover Operation Overlord and Operation Market Garden for the BBC.
Read moreDick Winters: Before ‘Band of Brothers’
Dick Winters might be the best-known soldier of World War II, but the heroics immortalized in “Band of Brothers” barely received notice at the time.
Read moreD-Day: Keeping the Mulberry secret
The “Mulberry” artificial harbors were one of the great engineering feats of the war, but it was months after D-Day before word of their existence appeared in the press.
Read moreD-Day: Ernie Pyle’s struggle to tell the invasion story
If there was one person the American public wanted to hear from once news of the Normandy invasion broke, it was Ernie Pyle. Through his work in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, millions had come to rely on the diminutive columnist’s vivid portrayals of everyday soldiers. Now that the most overwhelming day of the war had arrived, surely Ernie would
Read moreD-Day: Martha Gellhorn goes rogue to get her story
Like everyone else in her line of work, Martha Gellhorn was anxious in the spring of 1944, wondering where the invasion of Western Europe would begin and how she might secure a place near the action. The veteran war correspondent wrote to her friend Eleanor Roosevelt on April 28, frustrated that she had allowed her husband, Ernest Hemingway, to coax
Read more‘D-Day has come’: Breaking the invasion news to the world
The first report of D-Day comes from the Germans. At 6:33 a.m. London time, 43 minutes after the opening salvos of the pre-invasion naval bombardment, Berlin radio announces that the invasion has begun. Four minutes later, at 12:37 a.m. Eastern War Time, an Associated Press bulletin hits the wire: LONDON TUESDAY JUNE 6 (AP) — THE GERMAN NEWS AGENCY TRANSOCEAN
Read moreD-Day: Behind enemy lines with a typewriter
Paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions jumped with 125 to 150 pounds of equipment on D-Day, loaded down with whatever they might need to be self-sufficient until the linkup with seaborne troops or aerial resupply arrived. Time correspondent William Walton didn’t jump with a radio or machine gun components like some of his compatriots, but he did strap
Read moreMissing D-Day: ‘Performers without an audience’
Around 3 a.m. on June 6, 1944, restless and unable to sleep, Lt. Vernon A. Walters turned on the radio in his room at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome. He heard German radio announce that the Allied invasion had begun, in Normandy, and pondered whether to tell his boss right away. Walters opted to sit on the news for a
Read moreD-Day: Joan Ellis and the AP’s accidental invasion report
The flash hit the Associated Press wire at 4:39 p.m. Eastern War Time on Saturday, June 3, 1944: FLASH LONDON EISENHOWER’S HEADQUARTERS ANNOUNCED ALLIED LANDINGS IN FRANCE U.S. broadcast news operations had been poised for just such an alert for weeks, and immediately sprang into action. Seconds after the flash hit the wire, CBS broke into the Belmont Stakes broadcast
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