In my father's footsteps
My father, 1264340 Cpl Eric Heathcote, was part of the RAF team who ran up Omaha Beach on D-Day. The film “Saving Private Ryan” is “economical” with the truth. Omaha was not a solely-US operation – the Americans needed the British, to provide them with radar support for that part of the Normandy invasion. By a curious twist of fate, just recently I have found a research paper which has led me to view of copy of the very map my father’s RAF team will have used on 6th June 1944.
The full story of my finding the map is told elsewhere on this website. Suffice it to say here that, one morning I found myself in the Map Room of the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, England.
This is the map, as depicted in the research paper. Most of it is unreadable: would the Oxford copy have better resolution?
