Page 74 - History of War - Issue 05-14

RECONSTRUCTING

D-DAY

Second W or ld W ar : Se venty year s on from the greatest in vasion in the histor y of
Second World War: Seventy years on from the greatest invasion in the history of
warfare, Nick Soldinger discovers that one remarkable hi-tech project is ensuring that
the achievements of the Normandy landings are being preserved for posterity

eneath the waves off the coast of recreate what is already apparently lost. Dassault brought in by glider – many of them in the WACO
Normandy is a giant marine graveyard. Systèmes, a French company specialising in 3D CG-4R, or the Hadrian as the British dubbed it.
There, rusting, covered in coral or slowly software design, has undertaken a mammoth These gliders were mostly constructed from
sinking into the sands, are hundreds project – to create a virtual reconstruction of wood and canvas, and it’s thought that not one of
of tanks, vehicles, weapons and, no the engineering feats that made D-Day possible. the original 14,000 built for D-Day has survived.
doubt, human remains, relics from And it’s started with three that were crucial to Dassault Systèmes’ aim, therefore, was to
the D-Day invasion that happened the success of the operation. build a virtual one, from scratch, using 3D
B there 70 years ago this month. It’s not technology. Not surprisingly, the company started
inconceivable that in another 70 years, the sands Terrifying insight with the original blueprints for the aircraft, but
of time will have swallowed all of it completely. Although we primarily think of the D-Day landings these had deteriorated so badly that they were
To ensure that as much of that epochal as a seaborne invasion (indeed, the campaign deemed unusable. Even those that had been
event as possible is preserved, a team of was even codenamed Operation Neptune), preserved on microfilm were so badly copied
experts using state-of-the-art technology have around 25,000 airborne troops played a key that the dimensions were illegible.
been working to capture this history as close to role in securing vital inland targets such as A meticulously rebuilt model did, however, exist
intact as is possible. Archaeologists, historians bridges, crossroads and strategically important in Minnesota, which the team mapped using
and engineers have been collaborating not villages, the night before the ships appeared on lasers. They took over two million measurements
just to document what is still here, but also to the horizon. Those who didn’t parachute in were of the reconstruction from every angle. This data,
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