![]() It was a technology worth developing.” Utah Beach model, detail. “(The soldiers) identified with it, ‘That’s really a road I’m going to come next to a little forest, and woodland, a here’s a field,’ ” Burwell later told the Library in an interview. 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. 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. 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. Burwell, interview with the Library in 2003. 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. 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. The night before the invasion - dubbed Operation Overlord - Allied Supreme Commander Dwight D. It was the power of American mapping intelligence that helped the men in this momentous battle that became known as the “The Day of Days.” It required overcoming the terrain, too: the beaches, the heights above them, the marshes just inland and the open fields cut into rectangular sections by tall hedgerows. The troops aboard knew that murderous machine gun and artillery fire awaited them.īut the liberation of Europe would take more than overcoming the German military immediately before them. On June 6, 1944, Allied landing crafts approached the French coast to commence D-Day. The model of Utah Beach used to brief Eisenhower and Montgomery the night before D-Day.
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