Good morning, Whitewater.
Saturday in town will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 5:16 and sunset 8:30, for 15h 13m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 82.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1944, Allied forces landed at Normandy, and the New York Times reported the news to its readers the following morning:
By Drew Middleton By Cable to The New York Times
Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, Wednesday, June 7–The German Atlantic Wall has been breached.
Thousands of American, Canadian and British soldiers, under cover of the greatest air and sea bombardment of history, have broken through the “impregnable” perimeter of Germany’s “European fortress” in the first phase of the invasion and liberation of the Continent.
Comminiqué, issued at the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, before last midnight, reported that all initial landings, which had earlier been located on the coast of Normandy, in northern France, had “succeeded.” The Germans told of heavy fighting with Allied air-bone troops in Caen, road and railroad junction eight and one-half miles inland from the Seine Bay coast, and the enemy said there was heavy fighting at several points in a crescent-shaped front reaching from St. Vaast-la-Hougue, on the west, to Havre, on the east.
[The German Transocean News Agency said early Wednesday that the Allies had made “further landings at the mouth of the Orne under cover of naval artillery,” according to The Associated Press. The agency said “heavy fighting” was raging. [A British broadcast, recorded by Blue Network monitors, said Wednesday that “another air-borne landing south of Cherbourg has been reported.” Another British broadcast said that Allied bulldozers were busy “carving out the first RAF airfield on the coast of France.”]At last midnight, just over twenty-four hours after the beginning of the operation, these were the salient points in the military situation:
1. Despite underwater obstacles and beach defenses, which in some areas extended for more than 1,000 yards inland, the Atlantic Wall has been breached by Allied infantry.
2. The largest air-borne force ever launched by the Allies has been successfully dropped behind the Atlantic Wall and has attacked by second echelon of German defenses vigorously. The Germans estimate this force at not less than four divisions, two American and two British, of paratroops and air-borne infantry.
3. Most of the German coastal batteries in the invasion area have been silenced by 10,000 tons of bombs and by shelling from 640 naval ships. The shelling was so intense that H M S Tanatside, a British destroyer, had exhausted all her ammunition by 8 o’ clock yesterday morning.
4. Against 7,500 sorties flown from Monday midnight to 8 A.M., Tuesday, by the Allied Air Forces during the first day of the invasion the Luftwaffe has flown fifty, and the main weight of the enemy air force in the west, estimated at 1,750 aircraft, has not entered the battle.
5. The first enemy naval assault on the Allied invasion armada was beaten off with the loss of one enemy trawler and severe damage to another.
There is reasonable optimism at this headquarters now, but there is no effort to disguise concern over several factors, among them weather and the shape of the first major German counter-blow.
What is for us, now, a matter of seemingly inevitable triumph was, for Americans then, a matter of uncertainty and personal worry, for the war effort and for the well-being their loved ones serving in it.
On this day in 1996, Congress authorizes Wisconsin to proceed with welfare reform:
On this date the U.S. House of Representatives voted 289-136 to approve H.R. 3562, the Wisconsin Only bill. This bill authorized the state of Wisconsin to implement its statewide welfare reform demonstration project, Wisconsin Works, or W-2. [Source: Library of Congress]