A great thing about history is you never know when a primary source, “lost” object, or simply something so rare you didn’t even know existed comes along.

In the last century, the D-Day landings at Normandy remain one of the most important, studied, and well-documented operations of that war. One would think that all that could be found, would already be well known.

Much of the research and story telling of the invasion starts at the surf-line. The story at sea is mostly in the background. Recently, a great new primary source has surfaced.

As reported by Michael E. Ruane in yesterday’s Stars and Stripes, sometimes things happen by accident;

In 1994, Campbell, then a machinery mechanic in a chocolate factory and a resident of Mastic Beach, New York, bought the old cabin and its contents in Mattituck, about 30 miles away on Long Island. His wife, Maureen, was pregnant, and they needed a bigger house.

The cabin happened to be the former vacation retreat of the late Albert Stern, who was vice president of Frederick Hart & Co., the New York firm that manufactured the Recordgraph.

The basement was filled with Stern’s dusty old belongings.

As Campbell began cleaning things out, “I ran across this stuff that says, 1944, VJ day, all these different things from the war,” he said. “I put them all in a plastic bag, [thinking] ‘These gotta be something, I’ll look at them another day.’ . . . I put them away, and life went on.”
…
Fifteen years later, he said, he decided to research the mysterious trove he still had in his basement. “I finally looked at it after all those years, and that’s when [I started on] this path,” he said.

What was that path?

…he found an electrical engineer, Adrian Tuddenham, in Bristol, England, who was an expert in antique audio machinery. Tuddenham had built a device that could play Amertapes from the war crimes trials.

Campbell asked Tuddenham whether the expert could play his tapes. The answer was yes.

In 2004, Campbell flew to Bristol with his tapes in his carry-on luggage.

When Campbell heard the Hicks audio, “the hair on my arms stood on end,” he said. “It was unbelievable.”

What did he find?

(In 1944) George Hicks was the 38-year-old London bureau chief for what was then the Blue radio network, a predecessor of ABC. He was on the deck of the USS Ancon, a key communications ship, and was using an early tape-recording machine known as a Recordgraph, which was later used to record the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

As the ship stood off the French coast the evening of June 6, Hicks captured the sounds of German air attacks on the support vessels. His report is punctuated with the roar of gunfire, the drone of enemy aircraft and the cries of those on board.

His voice is tense but controlled, as he yells over a crescendo of antiaircraft fire. “Another one coming over! A cruiser right along side of us is pouring it up!”

Somebody in the background is heard yelling.

Earlier, Hicks, perhaps a little overwhelmed, had said: “If you’ll excuse, I’ll just take a deep breath for a moment and stop speaking.”

Ever want to know what it was like to be on a ship under attack by the Luftwaffe?

You really need to read the whole article. A short version here, and a longer recording you can listen to here.