A.C.C.E.S.S.

life:

Today marks the 75th anniversary of D-Day, a pivotal day in WWII where US troops and Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy. Pictured here is a view of the Normandy beachhead, taken one week after D-Day by LIFE photographer Frank Scherschel and published in the June 26, 1944 issue. According to LIFE, “A Week after first landings, the Normandy beachhead had changed from a battlefield to a gigantic port area. Allies had captured small ports like Ouistreham and Isigny, but the beach was still the best place to land reinforcements, equipment and supplies.” (Frank Scherschel—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) #DDay #DDay75
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riversidearchives:

Strange Lights Over Ventura County

When we think of unidentified flying objects or U. F. O.’s, we think of space and of course NASA. The Navy is not the first government agency you would think of when it came to U. F. O.’s. At The National Archives at Riverside in our Naval records there is a U. F. O. report from the Naval Air Station at Point Mugu, California. This is a report in which two police officers from two different cities in Ventura county reported the same sighting to the Navy. Officer Orville Clinton of Fillmore reported to see four round silvery objects in the sky in the vicinity of the San Cayetano mountains heading north. As you can see from this report, about the same time in Santa Paula (which is just north of Fillmore) Police Sergeant D. A. Kelly saw the same four objects in the sky.

We have a subscription service to Fold3.com, which has the records of an Air Force program called Project Blue Book. Project Blue Book was created to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects between 1945 to 1969. There is a report of this sighting in Project Blue Book and here is the link to that report.  What is interesting about the Project Blue Book report is the Air Force found out about this incident through the local newspaper. The Project Blue Book report is very poor and they were waiting on the Navy to provide them with more details–which did not seem to show up. It seems the Navy was unaware of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book. At least the eyewitness accounts have been found at The National Archives at Riverside and if you are interested in viewing the originals or to view Project Blue Book on Fold3.com for free please come in for a visit.

Series: Central Subject Files 1957-1959. Record Group 181: Records of Naval Districts and Shore Establishments 1784-2000. (National Archives Identifier 7450434).

D-Day’s Top Secret Map

The night before the invasion — dubbed Operation Overlord — Allied Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, British General Bernard Montgomery and other leaders gathered in Portsmouth, a port city on the English Channel, for a last briefing on everything from the weather to the terrain. One of the key presenters was U.S. Navy Lt. Commander Charles Lee Burwell, a 27-year-old Harvard graduate who, while being “scared to death,” nonetheless delivered a short talk on the tides and the thousands of star-shaped steel barbs called “Czech hedgehogs” that the Germans had dropped just offshore to wreck landing crafts.

The map Burwell and others were using for this top-level briefing was spectacular: a one-of-kind, three-dimensional model of Utah Beach, the code name for beaches near Pouppeville, La Madeleine, and Manche, France. The top-secret model, made of rubber on two 4×4 sections, depicted the beach and the interior pastures sectioned off by those hedgerows, a geographic feature that obstructed lines of sight and created conditions for deadly, close-quarter combat. Later that night, Burwell took the model aboard transport ships, showing the commanders and troops the same raised maps of the terrain they would see for the first time in a few hours.

usnatarchives:

In honor of the 75th anniversary of D-Day, we’re going behind-the-scenes with Billy Wade, Kelsey Noel, and Kevin Quinn of the Still Pictures Branch at the National Archives in College Park, MD. They’ll be sharing original photographs related to D-Day and Operation Overload.

Tune in at noon EDT on June 6 for this special Facebook Live.