Lately there’s been a good bit of press devoted to covering the 65th anniversary of D-day, including Obama’s trip to meet with European leaders on the anniversary. Until yesterday on my drive home, I hadn’t even considered what the the origin of the word D-day. Maybe it's common knowledge...
It turns out that it D-day used to be a military term for the day an operation would take place – this is not as fancy an origin as I expected. I kind of expected an abbreviation for something like VE-day (Victory in Europe day).
D-day was just referred to as the day an operation would take place. The day before was referred to as D-1, and the day after as D+1 (Similarly, there is an H-Hour). This way, if the operation’s date needed to be changed, any planning documents wouldn’t need to be updated… and this actually ended up happening to the D-day Normandy invasion. It was pushed back a day due to bad weather.
Anywho, my search turned out being a good exercise in history – going to Wikipedia and the army’s website to find out a little more about D-day.
Posted by Jordan at June 6, 2009 12:27 PM | TrackBack