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WWII On This Day: August 14

What happened on August 14 during World War II? This date brings together 3 events from 1944, with period photographs and links to the full operations documented across WW2 Theatres.

1944
Allied landing craft off the Île d'Or at Le Dramont, Camel Beach, during the landing in Provence, August 1944.
Landing craft off the Île d'Or at Le Dramont, Camel sector, August 1944 · Public domain · Source
Operation Dragoon

The deception goes in

Aircraft dropped several hundred dummy parachutists west of the real drop zones, fitted with firecracker devices to simulate small-arms fire, while naval groups made feints towards the Baie de la Ciotat to draw attention west of the true beaches. The Nineteenth Army spent part of the night reacting to landings that were not happening. The scale of the deception was small compared with Normandy and it did not need to be large, because the coast was thinly held everywhere.

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Operation Dragoon

The message goes out to the maquis

The BBC broadcast the personal messages that told the Forces françaises de l'intérieur across the whole south to begin. Around 75,000 fighters were in the field between the Tarn and Haute-Savoie, and they had been cutting rail lines and telephone cables since June. The result was that the German command lost its communications and its roads at the same moment, and that large areas of the interior were already in Resistance hands before an Allied soldier reached them.

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A converted cable ship laying pipeline across the English Channel, 1944.
Pipeline laying in the Channel, 1944 ·
Operation PLUTO

Sancroft's line is lost at the shore

HMS Sancroft completed another cross-Channel lay. The cable fouled the propeller of HMS Algerian during the difficult shore-end operation and was rendered unusable.

Continue in Operation PLUTO →