Was looking at this photo of US troops in Southampton before D-Day, thought I'd look for the location on GoogleStreetView & I noticed there is still washing on the line. click here to get a zoomable image OPERATION OVERLORD (THE NORMANDY LANDINGS): D-DAY 6 JUNE 1944. © IWM (NYT 27247) IWM Non Commercial License 3D on Streetview, Google Maps Streetview. Google Maps Washing on the line in garden on the right.
Does anyone know what artillery unit that is ? Tried to zoom in on the mudguard , is that 4A I can see? If it is , I read that 4th Armored didn't go to Normandy until July. 4th ARMORED DIVISION - Order of Battle of the United States Army - WWII - ETO | U.S. Army Center of Military History
Nope. 4th AD Armored Field Artillery battalions were equipped with 105mm GMC M7, not 105mm Howitzer M2A1 and Hi-Speed Tractors M5. I suspect it isn't 5 June at all and is actually much later...possibly July. 5 June was intermittently overcast and wet, so I doubt anyone was hanging washing. Nor did any Americaan units embark at Southampton for D-Day. It was the embarkation port for 50 British Division.
I was misled by the title of this thread. I automatically assumed that it was a reference to the 1940 hit, "They're hanging out the washing on the Siegfried Line". I have vague memories of a box game based on the theme.
That 'US Embassy Collection' it's filed under on IWMC is good. Interesting how some are fair use & some not. You'd think within a single collection there'd be uniformity, but I suspect some are from Life & other periodicals: Search objects | Imperial War Museums Some nice, if familiar, DDay stuff within it in the same 'folder' as this shot. Sadly not possible to place it in a chronology like you often can - feels like at some point someone curated a specific display for the embassy or similar. : Search objects | Imperial War Museums Rich, it's pretty hard to judge the sun's brightness from B&W shots really. Especially slightly over-exposed ones like this. And 'not actually pissing down' would be fine for hanging washing out. (Looks like she's rushing to take down Grandad's smalls as some sod's pointing a camera...) From photos of my parent's area almost 10 miles from the South coast, the entire area was a cluster-f traffic jam in the DDay build-up. Scumpton would have been somewhere with better than average roads so I wouldn't be too surprised at it having all sorts passing through. Few snippets: Southampton and D-Day Aha. Deffo septics there during the build-up: BBC - WW2 People's War - My War Memories - By Margaret May BBC - WW2 People's War - D-Day Seen by a 10-year-old Boy: In Poole Looking on Maps, Hoglands isn't far but the common is just around the corner. C'mon, O. Extend your savant location-spotting to a unit ID.
Apparently the US Army 14th Transportation Corps were running some Scumpton Docks. Quite a bit out there from the increasingly good US Mil history chaps. Might be a list or two out there somewhere. Search Southampton here and it seems possible people were still landing in Scum to distribute elsewhere 'till very late in the day: https://history.army.mil/html/books/010/10-21/CMH_Pub_10-21.pdf Weren't a fair few US blokes stationed in Northern Ireland for the training phase? You'd expect them to ship in via Liverpool or Cardiff, but I imagine the situation was vastly complicated. Blimey. Always the massive numbers...
