The D in DDay

'D' wasn't an exclusive letter for amphibious operations. In the Pacific they frequently used 'L' - IIRC this was used at both Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and was often given the phonetic name, i.e. 'Love' or 'Love Day'. I think I've also seen D-Day described as 'Dog' a few times.

I think 'Day' was appended to 'D' and 'L' just to give them context. Talking about 'D' on its own would have been potentially confusing, whereas D+1 etc. is more intuitively obvious. For example, saying "We are going to land on 'D' at 1000 hours" might lead someone to think that 'D' was a geographical position. The hyphenated term D-Day is quite modern, whereas in contemporary war diaries it's a bit more loosely phrased, for example "'D' Day", or "'D' day", or even "day 'D'", i.e. it's the "D" that is important and not the "Day".

 

Some of this sounded familiar:
Eleven things you might not know about D-Day

 

Ho,

Suspect the French "le jour J" was a postwar copy of the English original. In one allied airman's account composed prior to June 6th he referred to it as "der Tag".

Regards ...

 

That'll be me.
The evidence is quite strong, coming from David Strangeways himself in his IWM recordings. I'll reproduce the X/Twitter thread with a bit more detail on here, once I have done some boring stuff for the day job.

 

Pretty much all of the pictures you see on line are reproduced from two sources - both produced immediately post-war.

 

Fact No. 1 at the Imperial War Museum ~

Fact No 1

Best regards,

Steve

 

U.S. National Archives photos of inflatable decoy Sherman tank in the Anzio beach area. Pictures dated May 20, 1944.

 

Thank you - one less set of reference data to upload.

These are British decoys and also appear in the IWM Online Collection. They are often mis-attributed to a. OP FORTITUDE or b. the US Ghost Army.

Shows pretty much the standard that the Allies were at in early 1944 - i.e. low fidelity decoys.

 

HELP Please. I can no longer post new messages for some reason. I am trying to identify and a model of what appears to be a US Infantry Landing ship, maybe an APA or an AKA. The ship is unusual in that it has a coventional foremast and a bi-pole "Goalpost" mainmast. The model maker has carefully numbered the LCAs, the ones I can read are A10 07, A10 09, A10 17, A10 19 and A10 23. There is also an LCM 185 or 1185. Do these numbers mean anything to anyone please. The model is at the Nothe Fort Museum at Weymouth UK. They label their 'Mystery Ship' as either the Charles Caroll or HMS Glenroy, but neither of these seem to have a goalpost mainmast. The ships I have found that do have goalposts throughot.

 

Photo I hope!

 

Do you have findings that these decoys were ever attacked by German aircraft?

 

Not yet... :-/

It looks like both First and Eighth Armies had their own independent camouflage (decoy) companies in Italy:

• First Army:
  • 101 Royal Tank Regiment
• Eighth Army:
  • No. 1 (Palestine) Camouflage Company, later replaced by
  • No. 85 Camouflage Company, South African Engineer Corps

I think a troop of 101 RTR were responsible for setting up the decoys photographed in the Anzio beachhead. Whether they were bombed (or shelled by Anzio Annie) sounds like another research topic.

I tripped across a large box of 101 RTR stuff at TNA last time I was there but, unfortunately, closing time was approaching so that gem will have to wait for another day.

 

Definitely shelled but no mention of air attacks.

 

Interesting that you mentioned the Krupp railway gun. According to the story at the link below, the German officer in charge of the two railway guns had his own decoys. And flash simulators too, timed to coincide with real shots fired. The tunnel hideaway was fortuitous.

ANZIO ANNIE THE STORY OF A GUN - South African Military History Society

 

Looks like it's older! According to this document, the term 'D Day' was adopted by the (UK) War Office on 15 January 1940 to avoid confusion with the French system, as "the French system is both simpler and more logical than ours". It also explicitly states that the 'D' simply stands for 'Day':



Found in this microfilm file at the Indian Archives: MF_222400019025

Martin

 

Interesting find! Now we know why 1940 was such a disaster. French and British forces started supposedly joint operations one day apart!

The proposed new system obviously did not catch except for the change from "Z" to "D". I am not convinced that the French system was really simpler or more logical. The D-1, D and D+1 system looks clearer and more foolproof to me. For example, if D Day = 6 June, when you get to D+17 (23 June), writing it D18 is bound to be interpreted by some as 24 June instead.


By the way, the correct writing is "D Day", without the hyphen. Hyphenating anything and everything is a post war mania, and in this case particularly absurd:

D-1 = Day minus one
D-Day = Day minus Day = 0 = never!

Or the other way round: if "D-Day" means "D Day", "D-1" should be "Day one", which would also be D Day (or D1 using the French system)!

There was also a Y Day:



Michel

 

Dormandy Invasion?