WW2, D-Day Speech, General Eisenhower, June 6, 1944 -'The Light of Dawn' D-Day Film

[appalachiablue]

Last edited Mon Jun 17, 2024, 02:48 AM - Edit history (1)

- Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower's D-Day Speech, Order of the Day, June 6, 1944. (2 mins). Pritzker Museum and Library.
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- Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower's Order of the Day 1944. National Archives & Records Admin. Ed.

This order was issued by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to encourage Allied soldiers taking part in the D-day invasion.

Almost immediately after France fell to the Nazis in 1940, the Allies planned a cross-Channel assault on the German occupying forces. At the Quebec Conference in Aug. 1943, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt reaffirmed the plan, which was code-named Overlord. Although Churchill acceded begrudgingly to the operation, historians note that the British still harbored persistent doubts about whether Overlord would succeed. The decision to mount the invasion was cemented at the Tehran Conference held in Nov. and Dec. 1943.

Joseph Stalin, on his first trip outside the Soviet Union since 1912, pressed Roosevelt and Churchill for details about the plan, particularly the identity of the supreme commander of Overlord. They told Stalin that the invasion “would be possible” by Aug. 1, 1944, but that no decision had yet been made to name a supreme commander. To the latter point, Stalin rejoined, “Then nothing will come of these operations. Who carries the moral and technical responsibility for this operation?” Churchill and Roosevelt acknowledged the need to name the commander without delay.

Soon after the conference ended, Roosevelt appointed Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to that position.

By May 1944, over 2,876,000 Allied troops were amassed in southern England. While awaiting deployment orders, they prepared for the assault by practicing with live ammunition. The largest armada in history, made up of more than 4,000 American, British, and Canadian ships, lay in wait. More than 1,200 planes stood ready to deliver seasoned airborne troops behind enemy lines, to silence German ground resistance as best they could, and to dominate the skies of the impending battle theater. Amid uncertain weather forecasts, disagreements in strategy, and timing dilemmas based on the need for optimal tidal conditions, Eisenhower decided before dawn June 5 to proceed with Operation Overlord.

That afternoon, he wrote a note intended for release, accepting responsibility for the decision to launch the invasion and full blame should the effort to create a beachhead on the Normandy coast fail. More polished is his printed Order of the Day for June 6, 1944, which Eisenhower began drafting in Feb. It was distributed to the 175,000-member expeditionary force on the eve of the invasion...
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/general-eisenhowers-order-of-the-day

- June 6, 1944 - The Light of Dawn - D-Day. 1:40:19. (Best Documentaries, 2014).

The Light of Dawn tells the story of Operation Overlord. It traces the largest military operation man has ever conceived - since the summer of 1941 when Roosevelt and Churchill first broached the issue - to June 6, 1944. The film recounts the crucial turning point in WWII when questions of geopolitics (the difficult alliance between London, Moscow and Washington), the various military strategies and technological prowess, as well as the fate of young soldiers who will attack the Atlantic Wall and pay a heavy price...

[appalachiablue]

1. FOR WANT OF A NAIL A KINGDOM WAS LOST 👑 Popular expression in Britain WWII

- Well-Known Expressions -

< For want of a nail the kingdom was lost >

Meaning: No detail is too small to ignore to 🔨achieve a successful outcome

Background: This essence of this proverb dates back to at least the late 14th century in English and to the early 13th century in German.

The earliest extant reference is in the work of Freidank, an early 13th century didactic poet (i.e writer of poems intended to teach) who is thought to have lived somewhere around Swabia, which was part of the German kingdom of the time. His version translates something like:

* The wise tell us that a nail keeps a shoe, a shoe keeps a horse, a horse keeps a knight, a knight, who can fight, keeps a castle.

The earliest surviving reference in English is by John Gower in the late 14th century in his expansive poem Confessio Amantis ('The Lover's Confession'). Gower was a contemporary and friend of Geoffrey Chaucer so its safe to say that his Middle English version of the expression would be almost as unintelligible to most modern English speakers as Freidank's Germanic version is.

Where things get confusing is where the proverb in its modern form - including the reference to a lost kingdom - originated.
- Many sources point to it being a reference to Richard III of England's defeat at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. But there is a bit of a hole in this from an historic perspective as it would seem that Richard's horse did not lose a shoe but got stuck in the mud.

- Maybe we have Shakespeare to thank for the introduction of the concept of the loss of the kingdom due to the loss of the horse:

A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!
🐎 - Richard III, Act V, Scene IV

But versions of the expression between Shakespeare's time and up to the 20th century don't appear to reference "kingdom". For example, in 1758 Benjamin Franklin in The Way to Wealth wrote:

⭐ For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
for want of a shoe the horse was lost;
and for want of a horse the rider was lost;
being overtaken and slain by the enemy,
all for want of care about a horse-shoe nail.

Some think that the lack of "kingdom" in American versions was due to the irrelevance of kingdoms to the newly formed United States of America, but there appear to be a lack of "kingdom" references in British versions as well.

Where the whole thing seems to come together is in "The Horseshoe Nails" by James Baldwin (1924-1987), one of the stories in his Fifty Famous People. The story ends:

"For the want of a nail the shoe was lost;
For the want of a shoe the horse was lost;
For the want of a horse the battle was lost;
For the failure of battle the kingdom was lost;—
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail."

It seems difficult to believe that James Baldwin was the first to include the use of "kingdom," but with no evidence to the contrary, this is where our trail ends!
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Updates: Becky writes: "I remember this phrase being used in a book I read as a child (unless my memory has betrayed me) - What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge, published in 1892...
https://www.bookbrowse.com/expressions/detail/index.cfm/expression_number/558/for-want-of-a-nail-the-kingdom-was-lost