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D-Day

Show right now on BBC1 regarding how they did DDAY, may be of interest to Inkpenspur
 
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What a superb thread. I have no D-Day stories to tell but I have massively enjoyed reading the accounts of those that have. Thanks for posting.
 
Today I found out I'm going to be doing 5 days of army training in the Israeli Army as part of my Israel Tour in summer.

Let's see how I come out of that...
 
Got my Mum's old box of war stuff to look at today.. from my Grandad's memories. Found a map of Europe where he drove his tank. The item is falling to bits and I need to scan it to preserve the memory of it I think. Do you think it would be alright to post it up. Won't be breaking any laws or stuff would I.
 
Got my Mum's old box of war stuff to look at today.. from my Grandad's memories. Found a map of Europe where he drove his tank. The item is falling to bits and I need to scan it to preserve the memory of it I think. Do you think it would be alright to post it up. Won't be breaking any laws or stuff would I.

Id love to see it if you can post it...
 
Just wanted to point out I am doing this but I always have problems using the scanner.. thing does my head in.

I want it done properly, so is taking a lot longer that I thought it would, there is a lot of damage to it.. so there might be gaps where the map is torn between folds.

Anyway, this show a tiny piece, at the minute I am working with a map that is 30,000 pixels by 30,000. I think though to get it accurate I am going to have to scan loads of little areas and jigsaw it.

eg5mdc.jpg
 
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Keep going SH... it is a bit difficult to see which part of western/northern Europe it is showing from your scans so far though...
 
Its just a thumbnail.. the map picture is 366mb. lol I don't know why it takes so long. Over an hour to scan each piece. And for some reason the computer is clearly saying don't like this, and everything turns to a crawl. You might be able to see the pen marks on the thumbnail, these are the routes he drove his tank. He was there for the whole war only sidelined for 6 months because of some fever he picked up, as well as his tank being hit by a shell. Him and his colleagues from the tank were taking a rest, shirts off playing cards and having a cup of tea, next thing they knew a shell had hit them and he sadly lost two of his colleagues. For him he lost just a finger. My granddad only ever told us this story and one other.. (because we always as kids kept asking where is your finger grandad) the other I don't wish to put on the forum really and was told to us when we were doing the War in history GCSE and we were old enough to take on board, we never really needed to ask any more thereafter.

You may have noticed, which I didn't take much notice until it was pointed out by my other half, the map is German. Whether they were specifically given German maps or he accosted it on his 'travels' we don't know.
 
You've done well with the scanning Superhudd. Any idea which of the two main tracks came first, and when? Left hand track goes roughly from Rotterdam down to Nimes in the south... whereas the eastern track goes from Budapest in the south up to Warsaw, then west towards Leipzig, past the east of Berlin and then north to meet the Baltic at Bremerhaven/Lubeck.

I assume the western track was at the begining of the war and went North to South, and the eastern track was later in the war... it's very intriguing to be honest... Did your Grandad stay in the army after the war or was he de-mobbed immediately? Any idea what tank regiment he was in? I'd love to do some digging if you don't mind.
 
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He left I believe straight away, but I need to check with mum.. he got married in 49 to his sweerheart, my nan, we have all the 'love' letters he sent whilst out there, my Mum was born in June 49 too so could have been shotgun too haha,

There is actually in my mums box also a church service book which he went to, that highlighted those that were lost in his regiment. I would imagine that was his regiment, I can dig that out later today. I honestly do not know which was first out of the two journey's, although I would imagine that the west is the more obvious route first, surprised he even travelled near east Berlin tbh, as that was mainly Russian occupied.
 
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OK.. This was a tad quicker, just took a photo of the booklet on my phone and sent it to myself as an email. As said I'm not sure that this is his Battalion or not, it was a service he went too after the war.

2ldtz6a.jpg


Just got some more info from my mum too.

Apparently he tried to enlist when he was 16, but was rejected, he had taken his older brothers papers.
He eventually enlisted a full 3 months before he was 18 on 17th Nov 1942. Where on enlisting he learned to drive a tank.
At some point he was flown to Bern in Switzerland where he was given hospital treatment for Diphtheria. They pumped him full of penicillin which made him from then on immune from such medicine
Apart from his two stories, that we know off, the pen marks he said were where he went
He served under Montgomery
And he always went on about how useless the Americans were.
 
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