On this day in 1944:
- The Battle of Bréville took place. British paratroopers captured Bréville-les-Monts, and the Germans would never again make a serious attempt to break Allied lines in Normandy.
- Operation Tonga, the British contribution to the paratrooper assault, was declared a success. Operation Perch, to encircle and capture Caen, began.
- All across Normandy, the long hard slog inland begins.
- Meanwhile, ♫down in sunny Italy♫, some D-Day Dodgers fought Operation Hasty, a 60-man paratrooper operation to harry the retreating Germans in Abruzzo that ended in failure. Only 27 made it home. However, they did tie up a whole German division for a while as they were hunted down.
- In the Pacific, the USS Harder sinks its second Japanese destroyer in as many days, the Hayanami.
- And back in the United States, Judy Garland divorces her first husband.
And on one final point of trivia, the next day, June 8, Gregory Peck will make his feature film debut in Days of Glory, playing a Russian partisan. The film was a flop. Peck had been exempted from military service because of a back injury he got during dance training. This wasn’t macho enough for the studio so they would claim it was a rowing accident.
Over to you, folks.