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[ecrea] call for papers: ‘Ghost landings’ and their consequences in Europe: 1940-1944

Thu Nov 07 20:48:59 GMT 2013




‘Ghost landings’ and their consequences in Europe: 1940-1944 .



The Allied landings in Sicily, Anzio, Normandy and Provence are well known today. But there are also those that never took place.

The fall of France and the British Expeditionary Force’s retreat to Dunkirk, followed by its evacuation thanks to a rather disparate fleet, may have led the German High Command to think that a quick landing on British beaches was possible (Operation Sea Lion).

For their part, some Allied plans to liberate Europe were abandoned, for example because of strategic developments–such as Churchill’s plan for a landing in the Balkans in 1943. Some Allied plans also turned out to be deception stratagems to convince the enemy that the Allied invasion would take place in the Pas de Calais (Operation Fortitude / Operation Quicksilver) or in Norway (Operation Skye), or that the German code had not been broken.

The real landing of June, 6 1944 was preceded by failures, whether raids- such as on Dieppe- or ill-fated large-scale rehearsals, such as Operation Tiger on Slapton Sands in Devon.

All these preparations required planning and the implementation of combined operations involving land, sea and air units–the difficulty or the challenge for the attacker being to cross the sea so as to set foot on enemy territory.

On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of D-day Landing, ULCO (Université du Littoral & de la Côte d’Opale) will welcome an interdisciplinary conference on those themes on November 27 and 28, 2014. The chosen location, Boulogne-sur-mer, matches the theme as it was where gathered and trained from 1803 to 1805 part of the Army of the Ocean Coasts for Napoleon’s aborted invasion of England.

The conference aims to address from the Allied and the German sides how the aforementioned ghost landings and preparations contributed to the success of the landings in Normandy and in Provence in 1944.

What kind of images and representations did they also give birth to? How were they reflected in cultural media, and more particularly how were they portrayed in literature and film ? For example these themes appeared in novels like Fortitude, which then became a feature film, or in The Eye of the Needle, which also became a film, in documentaries (for example on Operation Tiger), or in television series (such as Foyle 's War) .

Proposals in French or in English (with a title and an abstract of about 300 words), as well as a short biography, should be sent by January 30, 2014 to :

Xavier Boniface ((Xavier.Boniface /at/ univ-littoral.fr)) and Nathalie Dupont ((Nathalie.Dupont /at/ univ-littoral.fr)).

Participants will be notified in February.

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