Navy Medicine At Normandy D-Day
It’s one thing to read accounts of combat. It’s an order of magnitude higher when you can watch a documentary containing footage of that battle and hear veterans who were there narrating their experiences. I have been reading about the D-Day Invasion of Normandy, during World War II, for 60 years. I’ve read books, watched documentaries, and fictional accounts of the invasion all my life. Other than the opening of the movie, Saving Private Ryan, I cannot recall any other example of something as impactful as this 32-minute documentary, produced by the US Naval School of Health Sciences Visual Information Directorate for the US Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. It features the US Navy’s 2nd, 6th, and 7th Naval Beach Battalions, who rendered aid to the wounded and dying on the D-Day beaches on June 6th, 1944, and in the days that followed. It also features an oral history from one of the nurses at Naval Base Hospital 12 in Southampton, England.
If you are researching the battle or any related topic, please watch this documentary. It excels at putting the viewer in “the big picture.” You do not have to be a historian to learn from this production. The contemporary footage perfectly frames the oral histories shared here. (Click on this image below. It will take you to a page on the Internet Archives where you can then click on the documentary’s thumbnail to start it.)
Navy Medicine Documentaries In Other World War II Battles
This blog post is the third in a series highlighting documentaries produced for the US Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery about 25 years ago. These need to be seen by more people. Jan Herman, then the historian for the Bureau, was the driving force behind the documentaries. You can read my two previous blog posts about this series, Pearl Harbor Oral Histories of Medical Personnel, and Bataan Death March and POW Oral Histories.
Did you arrive here via a search engine? I am the author of the forthcoming book Heroes By The Hundreds: The Story of the USS Franklin (CV-13). In addition to writing about the bravery of the crews that saved her, I will discuss the lessons we can learn in leadership and decision-making, and the changes the US Navy made because of those lessons.
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