6 juin

He noted that on Friday 6 June 1505, “at the stroke of the thirteenth hour”, he began to paint in the palace, and that just then the weather broke, the cartoon tore and rain poured down. His experimental paint would not dry and ran; he left the central fight unfinished in 1506, and Vasari’s…

A Benares Brahmin, Gaga Bhatt, performed the Vedic rites that made the rebel a chhatrapati, a sovereign king, with his own era and coinage.

From Shivaji’s hill forts to an empire run by the Peshwas, the Brahmin chief ministers in Pune. At its height in the 1750s Maratha armies collected tribute from Tamil Nadu to the Punjab.

Mallory chose Irvine, the young engineer, over more experienced climbers for a last attempt with oxygen. Odell photographed them setting out with eight porters. The next day the porters came down from Camp VI with notes: “Perfect weather for the job!”

Otis Barton’s hollow steel ball, 1.45 m across, hung on a single steel cable from a barge off Bermuda. A telephone line ran to the deck, where Gloria Hollister wrote down everything William Beebe described through the quartz windows. A 1932 dive went out live on NBC radio.

About 156,000 troops came ashore by sea and air on five beaches, the largest seaborne invasion in history. The catalogue’s D-Day timeline follows the day hour by hour.

The glider landings before dawn brought in guns, jeeps and headquarters. Brigadier General Don Pratt, assistant commander of the 101st, died when his glider crashed into a hedgerow; he was the highest-ranking Allied officer killed on D-Day.

Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway's 9th Parachute Battalion jumped about 600 strong and could muster about 150 at the rendezvous, with none of its heavy equipment. It attacked anyway and took the battery; about half the attackers were killed or wounded. The guns turned out to be old Czech 100 mm…

Bombers of No. 617 and No. 218 Squadrons flew exact, slowly advancing circuits dropping strips of foil (“Window”), so German radar saw convoys approaching Cap d'Antifer and Boulogne. Elsewhere, Operation Titanic dropped dummy paratroopers to draw German reserves away.

Some paratroopers of the 505th came down into the square, lit by a burning house, and were shot as they fell; John Steele hung from the church steeple by his canopy for hours. At dawn Lieutenant Colonel Edward Krause's battalion held the town, one of the first liberated in France, and raised the…

About 24,000 paratroops and glider troops landed on the flanks: the American 82nd and 101st Airborne behind Utah, the British 6th Airborne east of the Orne. Cloud and flak scattered most of them far from their drop zones.

Through the night RAF Bomber Command had dropped over 5,000 tons of bombs on coastal batteries. At dawn the fleet's battleships, cruisers and destroyers opened fire, and American heavy and medium bombers attacked the beaches. Over Omaha the heavies, bombing through cloud and delaying release to…

Three German torpedo boats from Le Havre came out of the smoke screen off Sword and fired their torpedoes. One broke the back of the Norwegian destroyer Svenner, killing 32 Norwegians and one Briton. She was the only Allied ship sunk by the German navy that morning.

The 741st Tank Battalion launched its duplex-drive tanks, floated on canvas screens, about 6,000 yards out into a heavy sea. 27 of the 29 launched sank, many with their crews. The infantry on the eastern half of Omaha went in almost without armour.

The US 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions landed on the most strongly held beach, under bluffs 30 to 50 metres high. The Allies had not known that the German 352nd Infantry Division had moved up behind the coast. Tide, current and smoke put most boat teams in the wrong place; by mid-morning the beach…

Convoys from ports between Falmouth and Felixstowe met at Area Z, nicknamed Piccadilly Circus, south-east of the Isle of Wight, then turned south down channels swept by minesweepers. Operation Neptune, the naval part of the invasion, used nearly 7,000 vessels.

The 8th Infantry of the US 4th Division landed about 2,000 yards south of its planned sector, pushed by the current and with its control craft lost. The defences there were weaker. Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., 56, walking with a cane, decided to bring the follow-up waves in where they…

Company A of the 116th Infantry landed in front of the Vierville draw, one of the strongest points on the beach, and was cut down in minutes. Its men included a group of National Guardsmen from Bedford, Virginia: 19 of them died that day, which is why the National D-Day Memorial stands there.

Lieutenant Colonel James Earl Rudder's 2nd Ranger Battalion companies, about 225 men, landed 40 minutes late and climbed the 35-metre cliff on rocket-fired grapnel ropes and ladders. The six 155 mm guns they had come for were not in their casemates.

The British 50th (Northumbrian) Division landed at Le Hamel and La Rivière, with the specialised armour of the 79th Armoured Division, the flail tanks and bridge-layers known as Hobart's Funnies, to clear mines and obstacles. Le Hamel held out until the afternoon.

The British 3rd Infantry Division landed on Queen sector with Caen, about 15 km inland, as its objective for the day. A rising tide narrowed the beach to a few yards and jammed the follow-up waves.

The 3rd Canadian Infantry Division landed either side of Courseulles at 07:45 and 07:55, ten minutes late because of the sea, so that many craft met the obstacles already under water. Stacey counts 1,074 Canadian casualties on the day, 359 of them killed; the Juno Beach Centre, checking war…

Company Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis of the 6th Green Howards rushed a pillbox near the Mont Fleury battery and took it alone, then later that day drew fire at Crépon to rescue two of his men. His was the only Victoria Cross awarded for D-Day.

Brigadier General Norman Cota, assistant commander of the 29th Division, walked the shingle under fire urging men off it. To men of the 5th Ranger Battalion he is credited with the words that became the Rangers' motto.

Two kinds of people are staying on this beach, the dead and those who are going to die. Now let's get the hell out of here. — Colonel George A. Taylor, 16th Infantry Small groups led by junior officers and sergeants were already working up the bluffs between the draws.

With no exits open and the beach full, the control vessels stopped landing vehicles. Craft circled offshore waiting for a gap.

Lord Lovat's 1st Special Service Brigade came ashore on Sword to the bagpipes of his piper, Bill Millin, who played “Hielan' Laddie” on the beach under fire. Their task: cut through to the airborne troops at the Orne bridges.

Lieutenant Richard Winters led about a dozen men of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry, later reinforced, against a battery of four 105 mm guns firing on the causeways behind Utah, and destroyed them. The action is still taught at West Point.

The 177 French marines of Commandant Philippe Kieffer, landed with No. 4 Commando, attacked the fortified casino at Riva-Bella; a British tank finally silenced it. They were the only French troops in the first wave.

A Ranger patrol found five of the missing guns in an orchard inland, aimed at Utah Beach and unguarded. Sergeants Leonard Lomell and Jack Kuhn wrecked them with thermite grenades. The Rangers then held the point against counterattacks for two days; about 90 were still fit to fight when relief came.

Under the command of General Eisenhower, Allied naval forces, supported by strong air forces, began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France. Read to the press by Colonel R. Ernest Dupuy of SHAEF; in New York it was 3:32 in the morning. German radio had announced the…

Seeing the attack stall, American and British destroyers steamed in to within about 1,000 yards, some scraping bottom, and shelled strongpoints over the heads of the infantry. Offshore in USS Augusta, General Omar Bradley weighed diverting the follow-up forces to other beaches.

His chief of staff, Hans Speidel, telephoned Herrlingen with the news; 10:15 is Cornelius Ryan's time, and some accounts put the first call earlier. Rommel cancelled his visit to Hitler and set off for France by car, not by air, because of Allied fighters.

An immense armada of upwards of 4,000 ships, together with several thousand smaller craft, crossed the Channel. Shortly before noon Churchill first took note of the fall of Rome two days earlier, then announced the landings, saying that so far everything was proceeding according to plan.

A day on the road, more than 600 km to his headquarters at La Roche-Guyon on the Seine. He arrived in the evening, as the 21st Panzer Division's counterattack was faltering.

The 4th Division's troops pushing inland along a causeway over the flooded ground met men of the 101st Airborne who had taken the village. It was the first link between the seaborne and airborne forces behind Utah.

American bombers aiming for the Orne bridges, to block German reinforcements, hit the city instead, and more raids followed that night and the next day. The raids of 6 and 7 June killed more than 800 civilians; thousands sheltered in the abbey church of Saint-Étienne.

Lovat's commandos, piper Millin in front, marched across to join Howard's men, a few minutes late by the schedule. The seaborne and airborne forces on the eastern flank were joined.

V Corps signalled that troops pinned down on Easy Red, Easy Green and Fox Red were moving up the heights. By evening the Americans held a shallow strip at Omaha, the thinnest foothold of the five. Omaha cost about 2,400 casualties, the most of any beach.

The armoured reserve could only move on Hitler's order, and his staff had not woken him in the night. Not until early afternoon were the 12th SS and Panzer Lehr divisions released; Allied aircraft forced them to move by night.

The only German armoured division near the beaches attacked north from Caen into the gap between Sword and Juno. It was the one serious counterattack of the day.

The Staffordshire Yeomanry's Shermans, dug in with the King's Shropshire Light Infantry near Biéville, knocked out the leading panzers. The British advance on Caen stopped at Lebisey wood, just north of the city; Caen held out until July.

A battalion of the 192nd Panzergrenadier Regiment slipped through the gap and reached the coast at Lion-sur-Mer, where German strongpoints still held. It was the closest the Germans came to splitting the landings.

About 220 gliders of Operation Mallard brought the 6th Airlanding Brigade in over the Orne. Seeing them pass overhead, the German commanders feared they would be cut off, and 21st Panzer pulled back from the coast.

King George VI spoke to Britain and the Empire on the radio in the evening, recalling the four years since the nation had “stood alone” and calling for “a nationwide, perchance a worldwide, vigil of prayer”.

About 156,000 Allied troops were ashore or landed from the air. None of the day's main objectives was taken: not Caen, not Bayeux, not Carentan. Gold and Juno had joined up, but Sword stood alone and Omaha was a thin strip. Still, the Allies held a foothold that the Germans would not throw back.…

George Martin of EMI’s comedy label, Parlophone, had signed them on the strength of the Decca tape without seeing them. At this first session in Studio Two he liked the band and not the drumming: for records, he told Epstein, he would use a session drummer.

Starr had collapsed with tonsillitis the day before the world tour, so Jimmie Nicol, a London session drummer, played the first shows in his place. In Amsterdam fans jumped into the canals to reach the band’s boat. Starr rejoined in Melbourne on 14 June.

Geologist Walter Alvarez, his father Luis, a Nobel physicist, and the chemists Frank Asaro and Helen Michel found iridium, rare in Earth’s crust, enriched in the boundary clay: about 30 times background in Italy and 160 at Stevns Klint in Denmark. They proposed an asteroid about 10 kilometres…

Alexey Pajitnov wrote it on an Elektronika 60 at the Soviet Academy of Sciences' computing centre. It crossed the Iron Curtain on floppy disks, and the Game Boy version alone sold over 35 million copies.

Alexey Pajitnov, a researcher in artificial intelligence, based it on the pentomino puzzles he loved as a child, cut down to four squares for a computer that could only draw text; the name mixes tetra and tennis. The Soviet state owned it, and Pajitnov earned nothing from it until 1996, when he…