Friday, June 6, 2014

This is the poem the Allies used to signal the beginning of D-Day

D-Day (or "Operation Overlord" to use its official title) was a herculean planning task, requiring remarkable coordination both between the British, American, Free French, and Commonwealth armies, and with French resistance fighters on the ground, who were charged with helping aerial bombers disrupt German transportation routes, so as to impair the Germans' ability to send reinforcements. One of my favorite details of the whole plan was how the Allies alerted the French that it was time to begin sabotaging rail-lines: they had the BBC broadcast lines from Paul Verlaine's poem "Chanson d'automne."

By Dylan Matthews / continue 

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