A ceremony at a military cemetery near the site of the Allied invasion of Normandy, France(6th June 1944) to mark the 30th anniversary of the D-Day. British and French Army units parade. Gravestones and memorials in the foreground. Spectators stand holding flags. The troops salute. French President Valéry Marie René Georges Giscard d'Estaing lights a flame with others.
A ceremony at a military cemetery near the site of the Allied invasion of Normandy, France(6th June 1944) to mark the 30th anniversary of the D-Day. A band of the United States Air Forces in Europe(USAFE) marches. Girls bring wreaths. U.S. Army General Omar Nelson Bradley and other Allied officers lay wreaths at a memorial. The officers salute.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, looking frail, after his election to a 4th term, late in 1944. Newspapers announce his death, on April 12, 1945. View from high above, of funeral procession for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Crowds of mourners line sidewalks in Washington, DC, along the funeral route. Members of the military, in the crowd, salute as the flag-covered coffin of the President passes. Military pallbearers carry the coffin into the White House for a funeral service in the East Room. On April 15, 1945, Pallbearers carry Roosevelt’s coffin to a gravesite at the Roosevelt family home, Springwood, in Hyde Park, New York. Eleanor Roosevelt at President Roosevelt’s gravesite (4097 Albany Post Rd, Hyde Park, NY 12538, United States) with her children, including sons, James and Elliott, both in military uniforms.
Reminders of World War 2, in France, 1945. A high bridge of about eight masonry arches with two bombed out, in mountainous region of France. Camera pans right, showing a number of substantial homes scattered across the valley, with tall mountains behind. Scene shifts to a different, flatter landscape, where about a dozen U.S. Waco CG-4A gliders are seen abandoned in a field, in various states of disrepair. Writing in chalk on the side of one glider reads, "Whispering Yoddles, Fort Worth Texas, Little One Alice". There are no D-day stripes on these gliders, indicating they were probably used subsequent to the Normandy invasion, in other operations such as "Bluebird & Dove" in the South of France, in August, 1944.
Operations of the U.S. Army Air Forces 394th Fighter Squadron, 367th Fighter Group, at Juvincourt Airfield (Advanced Landing Ground A-68) in France, during Winter of 1944, World War 2. The entire field is covered in snow. Pilots ride to their P-38 aircraft on a train of sleds, pulled by a Carl Eliason Motor Toboggan (Made by Four Wheel Drive Auto Company of Clintonville, Wisconsin). Pilots playfully brush some snow toward the camera as they pass. They stop to let a pilot off at his P-38 (reportedly the pilot is Jack Hallett). Next, P-38 aircraft are seen taxiing for takeoff over the snow, and then, flying very low over the field. The sound of gunfire is heard in the background. An abandoned (crash-landed) RAF Avro Lancaster bomber is seen collapsed on its left wing and elevator, in the snow. (It has been suggested that this might be Lancaster serial no ME850 LS-D of XV squadron RAF that crash landed on January 1st, 1945 or Lancaster VN-G of 50 SQN that crashed there on the same day.)
German civilian Matthias Gierens, a 37 year old railroad worker, is hanged in Rheinbach Germany for the August 15, 1944 murder of a downed American flyer, who was later identified as U.S. Army Air Forces 2nd Lieutenant Lester E. Reuss, from Forsythe, Montana. Reuss was the navigator on U.S. Army B-17 bomber #42-31183 which was downed by German aircraft after it attacked the Airdrome at Wiesbaden, Germany. Gierens and three other German civilian men, Peter Kohn, Peter Back, and Matthias Krein, were convicted on June 2, 1945 in Ahrweiler, Germany, for the murder of the American airman after his parachute landing near Priest, Germany. The trial was the first Allied trial in Germany of civilians charged with a war crime. Military police are seen escorting Gierens toward the gallows in a prison yard in Rheinbach. A German Catholic priest performs the rites. U.S military officer reads charges as Gierens is readied for execution (the officer is possibly Lt. Col J.V. Roddy, of San Francisco, who was in charge of the hanging). Trap door opens and Gierens is hung. The U.S. Army executioners were Master Sgt. John C. Woods, a former Texas State executioner, and Staff Sgt. Thomas Robinson, of Bronx, New York. Witnesses present included seven U.S. Lieutenant Colonels and one British officer, a number of Military Police, news correspondents, and photographers.
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