Officers of the 208th Engineer Combat Battalion preparing to land at Utah Beach.
Posted on 06/18/2014 2:41:18 PM PDT by Vanders9
As part of the D-Day commemoration, Reuters photographer Chris Helgren compiled archive pictures taken during the invasion and went back to the same places to photograph them as they appear today.
What a different world we live in now that color has been invented! :-)
My dad was at Anzio, a combat engineer, and one of his unit's first jobs was to lift mines from just about everywhere. They wound up with an amazing number of the things. What to do with several thousand German mines?
They stuffed them all into one of the bunkers on the beach,as full as it would hold. They ran det cord all through them, ran the cord back a couple hundred yards, got down behind the blade of their armored bulldozer and touched it off.
Dad said that ten or twenty-foot jets of fire came out of every orifice in that bunker, tremendous noise, and . . . nothing. It had no effect on the bunker at all, other than some scorch marks.
He and Mom went back for the 50th Anniversary Victory Tour and the darned thing was STILL there - completely unharmed.
Great Photos! Thanks for the post.
That was fascinating. Thanks for posting it. My uncle was there - looking for him in the photographs.
Sort of a “What they did” and “Why they did it” portfolio.
Officers of the 208th Engineer Combat Battalion preparing to land at Utah Beach.
I was reading the history of Fathers outfit, also combat engineers.
They once pulled 18 mines out of a 9X9 foot plot. The Germans must have stacked them on top of each other.
I’m amazed that so many of the buildings either are still standing or were rebuilt and look exactly the same.
We should get those German builders to fix our roads here in Minnesota to last more than three years.
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