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Meg Waite Clayton

New York Times Bestselling Author

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June 5, 2019 By Meg Waite Clayton

On the 75th Anniversary of D-Day

It’s a rainy evening in Paris, just minutes before the hour, 75 years ago, that D-Day began. At midnight, RAF aircraft dropped hundreds of dummy paratroopers across Seine-Maritime, not far from here, as a distraction. Ten minutes later, the first pathfinders jumped over Normandy to mark drop zones for paratroopers and landing paths for gliders.

I find the things that move me personally lead me to my best writing, and this is a moment that has moved me for as long as I can remember. It inspired me to major in history in college, with a focus on 20th century wars. My reading about it lead me to the extraordinary efforts of Martha Gellhorn in covering the D-Day invasion — the only female journalist and one of the few journalists of any gender to go ashore in the first days. Her real story inspired the last two novels I have written: The Race for Paris, about a fictional woman journalist and photojournalist which draws from the real women journalists of the time; and Beautiful Exiles, about Martha herself.

I remain in awe of what Martha Gellhorn did to cover the invasion, and even more in awe of what the troops she covered did. I hope you’ll take a minute to honor them all in some way on this 75th anniversary of D-Day. I started by listening to Eisenhower’s words to the troops, below with photos from the day.

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Meg Waite Clayton

Meg Waite Clayton is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of THE LAST TRAIN TO LONDON, a Jewish Book Award finalist based on the true story of the Kindertransport rescue of ten thousand children from Nazi-occupied Europe—and one brave woman who helped them escape. Her six prior novels include the Langum-Prize honored The Race for Paris and The Wednesday Sisters, one of Entertainment Weekly's 25 Essential Best Friend Novels of all time. A graduate of the University of Michigan and its law school, she has also written for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Forbes, Runners World, and public radio, often on the subject of the particular challenges women face. megwaiteclayton.com

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