As a magazine research editor, I was occasionally fortunate enough to have a special assignment for National Geographic magazine. I had developed military stories as one of my specialties, along with marine archaeology. Sometimes, I helped pre-visualize artwork, and turned up locations for the magazine photographers to include in their coverage.  Tom Allen’s story, “Untold Stories of D-Day” sent me to Normandy, France to look for the wrecks of the sunken craft that went down during the invasion. The magazine was kind enough to give the readers a glimpse of my work in the On Assignment section.

A D-Day Mosaic; France; (Brief Article), National Geographic, June 1, 2002, Copyright 2002 National Geographic Society, SECTION: No. 6, Vol. 201; Pg. 142; ISSN: 0027-9358

Peering out of an old German bunker, now part of a museum on Normandy’s Utah Beach, senior researcher David W. Wooddell scouts out the sites where ships sank and men died. “You know people have paid a terrible price for something that was vastly worthwhile,” he recalls thinking.

David began his research for our D-Day article by reading every book he could find on the subject, surfing the Internet, “looking for the best documentary sources available.” Then he spent the equivalent of two weeks in the National Archives looking for maps and aerial reconnaissance photographs. “I was a photographer before I came to the magazine, so I shoot my own copies of historical photographs,” he says. Finally, he went to France for a week, visiting museums devoted to the invasion, seeking artifacts and other visual material.

While in France, David worked with Bertrand Sciboz, a French diver who owns a company in Normandy that maps wrecks of all ages off the coast. “At NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC we have the resource of time to develop information in detail, a luxury few other magazines have,” David says.

David’s research greatly aided our photographers, as well as author Tom Allen… Tom, who has written several articles and books about World War II and the people who fought in it, set out with the goal of covering the part of the invasion that has received minimal attention over the decades, the delivery of men and materiel to Normandy’s beaches.

“I’ve had the privilege of talking to people who helped win the war,” reflects Tom, 73. “You find a survivor and you find one little piece of the mosaic of that day, of the memory we’re all supposed to have of D-Day. I put my story together from their remembrances.”

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