ON DECRYPT
The D-Day as you have never heard. A report by an American journalist, recorded in the heart of D-Day on June 6, 1944, was found and exhumed 75 years later. An American, Bruce Campbell, found this exceptional sound document in the cellar of his house, purchased 25 years earlier. He had then discovered boxes filled with magnetic tapes, on which he only leaned a few years ago to unearth an audio treasure recorded in the middle of the "longest day".
>> LISTENING - D-Day, the story of a tragic but decisive battle
"It starts again, another hunter flies over us!"
The former owner of this house was the journalist George Hicks, correspondent for the NBC, boarded a battleship of the US Navy, USS Ancon, tells France inter. On the day of the D-Day, the reporter was present off the coast of Normandy, under the fire of the German army. His voice is sometimes covered by the buzz of planes, the roar of cannons, and the cries of men around. And on several occasions, he describes what surrounds him.
"An airplane is coming right up to port," he said, "the tracer bullets are like a bow above the boat, and it's starting again, another hunter is flying over us." At a time of the recording, we also hear the men on board rejoice to have managed to touch a German plane. And at the end of the report, the journalist's voice darkens: "Around us, it's dark, there is no light, no shots," he says. "It is midnight ten, in the early hours of June 7, 44".
The entire report available online
This recording, broadcast at the time on most American radios, caused a sensation. It was even "pressed in disc form and allowed the author to get his own radio show," says Le Monde . But so far, the soundtracks of the report had never been found.
Bruce Campbell, the American who exhumed this archive, first tried to sell these recordings ... without success. He finally agreed to give them to the D-Day Memorial National Museum in Bedford, Virginia, on the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings this year.
The full report is available on the Soundclound platform, in a 13 minute long version introduced by a journalist: