The New Yorker:

Chris Wilcha’s documentary explores life, love, and art through his connection to a venerable record store.

By Rebecca Mead
June 7, 2019

When, on the evening of June 5, 1944, troops set out from the south coast of Britain for what would be a decisive assault on the European mainland the following morning, A. J. Liebling, a writer for The New Yorker who had been among those covering the war in France and elsewhere, was among them. Liebling was aboard an infantry landing craft designated LCIL 88, along with thirty-odd members of the “ambiguous farce,” as the amphibious force, with an impressive taste for wordplay, referred to themselves. He observed them impregnating their shoes with grease to counter the mustard gas they expected to meet on the other side (“First time I ever tried to get a pair of shoes pregnant, sir,” one called out to him); played poker in the officers’ wardroom while waiting for auspicious weather conditions; and, once the ship had made its way to the French shore, watched the troops descending the ramp, heading into the shallow waters and their fate beyond, while an officer urged them to move along “as if he were unloading an excursion boat at Coney Island.”

In his account of the events of June 6th, D Day, which ran in the magazine in three installments soon thereafter with the understated title “Cross-Channel Trip,” Liebling did not identify his point of embarkation, referring only to “a certain British port,” which reminded him of Sheepshead Bay, in New York, with all its fishing boats. Eleven years later, liberated from the necessity to keep war secrets secret, Liebling wrote a follow-up piece about revisiting the site—revealed to be Weymouth, Dorset—from which he had set off to become one of those who were, if not first on the ground, at least first on the wave on June 6th. The notion to go back to the coastal town came to him, he wrote in June, 1955, while walking around St. James’s Square, in Westminster, in the sultry early-summer heat. While sneezing at the pollen from the square’s several mulberry trees, he noted a sign on the façade of Norfolk House identifying it as the place where General Eisenhower and the other Allied commanders had planned the invasion in which he had participated. “With my sneeze, but without causal connection between them that I can trace, came an impulse to go down to Weymouth again and see what it looked like,” Liebling recalled.

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