Troops from the U.S. 1st Infantry Divisionlanding on Omaha Beach
Omaha Beach was one of five sectors of the Allied invasion of German-occupied France in the Normandy landings on D-Day, 6 June 1944, during World War II. The untested 29th Infantry Division and nine companies of U.S. Army Rangers assaulted the western half of the beach; the battle-hardened 1st Infantry Division targeted the eastern half. The opposing German 352nd Infantry Division troops, mostly teenagers with no battalion-level training and some Eastern Front veterans, were largely deployed in strongpoints along the coast. The initial assault waves of tanks, infantry, and combat engineer forces were tasked with reducing the coastal defenses to allow larger ships to land. Little went as planned: most landing craft missed their targets, and the defenses were unexpectedly strong. Troops could not clear the heavily defended exits off the beach, delaying later landings. Groups of survivors eventually improvised assaults, scaling the bluffs between the most heavily defended points. By the end of the day, two small isolated footholds had been won, and the original objective of a beachhead 5 miles deep was achieved within days. (Full article...)
... that Pat, a character from the Inside No. 9 episode "Nana's Party", was variously described by critics as an "irritating tit", an "insufferable booby", and a "desperately sad and dignified man"?
The Hammer projection is a map projection described by Ernst Hammer in 1892. It uses the same 2:1 elliptical outer shape as the Mollweide projection. Both projections are equal-area, but by depicting parallels of latitude as curved lines rather than straight, Hammer reduced distortion toward the outer limbs, where it is extreme in the Mollweide.
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