This page last updated Tuesday, 28 November 2023
In addition to reporting updates regarding the Skylighters themselves, this section shines a light as it were on news, information, and other items of interest to former searchlight crewmen, antiaircraft artillery veterans of World War II, all members of The Greatest Generation, and WW II history buffs of all ages. The latest items are always on the top.
November 11, 2023
A documentary from 2017 that may have slipped under your personal radar.
“The Six Triple Eight: No Mail, Low Moral” tells the story of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion of the U.S. Women’s Army Corps, who were stationed in Birmingham, England, in 1945.
The unit improved morale by clearing a two-year backlog of more than 17 million pieces of correspondence between millions of American military personnel serving in the European theatre and loved ones back home.
In doing so, the 6888th challenged racial and gender stereotypes and contributed to the transformation of the U.S. military following the war.
November 8, 2023 …
Check out the Skylighters page at the North East War Memorials Project (UK).
February 3, 2022 …
self-propelled gun somewhere in France on September 14, 1944. Photo via U.S. National Archives.
Biden signs bill awarding Congressional Gold Medal to WW II’s ‘Ghost Army’ …
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/01/politics/ghost-army-world-war-ii-congressional-gold-medal/index.html
January 27, 2022 …
Danielle “Dany” Patrix Boucherie, a child when liberation from four years of German occupation came to her village, Sainte Marie du Mont, on D-Day, June 6, 1944, became “The Girl Who Wore Freedom” when her mother made her a red, white, and blue dress from material from American parachutes retrieved from nearby fields.
On June 1, 1945, she wore the dress to honor Allied forces at the first D-Day commemoration at nearby Utah Beach.
Now a documentary about Dany and others who survived two invasions – that of the Germans in 1940 to enslave them and that mounted by the Allies in 1944 to free them – “The Girl Who Wore Freedom” – reminds Americans and the World of what America is at her best: when she values people over politics, seeks to right the wrongs of injustice, and make sacrifices, when necessary, to free others from tyranny. The film is a timely reminder to never forget what the French have remembered for over 75 years: What America can be when Americans are true to their deepest values.
Click “Play” to watch the trailer.
January 20, 2022 …
At many reunions, the Skylighters always talked about the difficulties encountered in negotiating “hedgerow country” in Normandy in June and July 1944. In the video below, Normandy battlefield guide Paul Woodage gives an excellent primer on “The Normandy Bocage,” the definitive landscape feature of the countryside behind the beachhead that caused both the Allies and Germans to devise both new defensive and offensive tactics.
January 17, 2022 …
A look back to 21 September 2013, International Peace Day, when, on the Normandy beach at Arromanches, artists Jamie Wardley and Andy Moss and a team of international volunteers raked 9,000 fallen figures into the sand to create a massive monotone image called “The Fallen.”
The Fallen are without nationality, without names. Each represents a life lost, each one of the 9,000 civilian and military deaths occurring during the D-Day landings on 6 June 1944.
The Fallen | Lest we Forget from Jim Varney Photography Ltd on Vimeo.
January 16, 2022 …
What it was like for the average infantryman to land on Omaha Beach at H-Hour, 6 June 1944 is told with poignancy and emotion by Gerald E. Rock in a March 2004 interview for the National Military History Online Museum. His experiences during the Battle of the Bulge are also featured.
January 10, 2022 …
Ghosts of the 225th? Nope, just M. Rien Speksnijder’s tribute to the Skylighters spotted at a Dutch military vehicle collectors show. In addition to a 1942 General Electric 60-inch searchlight, GE power plant, and Fruehauf M18 searchlight trailer, Rien’s rig includes a Chevrolet one-and-a-half ton 4 x 4 cargo truck, all with 225th markings. Smaller than the two-and-half-ton 6 x 6 truck (the famous “deuce and a half”), the Skylighters used three 4 by 4s and two trailers to move the equipment used by a single searchlight section: one towing the light, another towing the power plant, and a third for the controller, cables, carbon arcs, fuel, tools, and miscellaneous equipment. Considering the battalion fielded 36 searchlights with power plants, the unit motor pool comprised 72 trailers and 108 trucks, not counting other trucks, jeeps, weapons carriers, etc. necessary for 800 men in the field. Not to mention additional transport once the battalion received their SCR-268 gun-laying radars.
on the Chevy truck reads “225AAA” and “C13” (indicating Battery C, Truck No. 13).
as it would have looked on the move in Europe, 1944-45.
January 8, 2022 …
The video below contains 16 minutes of digitally restored silent color film recordings taken by a U.S. Army motion picture unit headed by Hollywood director George Stevens of various scenes he and his film crew encountered in Germany both before and after V-E Day. Only ambient sounds (e.g. traffic, flowing water) have been added as no original soundtrack exists. You are in essence looking at Germany as it appeared to the Skylighters in 1945. Since they were stationed just south of Munich from May through December of that year, the brief footage of the city and surroundings is how it looked through their eyes nearly 80 years ago.
January 6, 2022 …
A well done demonstration of a standard General Electric 60-inch searchlight, the type used by the Skylighters in combat.
January 4, 2022 …
Among the Skylighters’ earliest missions on the Continent was the defense of many Allied advance landing grounds behind Omaha and Utah beaches, and on the Cotentin Peninsula around Cherbourg. In advance of forthcoming special sections on all the airfields defended by the 225th from France to Germany, and on the work of the aviation engineers in constructing them, here’s a short video about the importance of the advance landing grounds the Allies constructed in Normandy. The first, ALG-1, went operational in a pasture atop the bluffs overlooking Omaha Beach on June 7, D+1, landing several P-38 fighters. Once the Skylighters were ashore at full strength in terms of men and equipment, they set up at ALG-1 before moving east. Although the video is focused on a British field behind Gold Beach, the value of aircraft flying from several dozen Allied airstrips post-D-Day in securing the beachhead and facilitating the buildup that led to the breakout across France is not understated by historian Paul Woodadge.
January 2, 2022 …
Another excellent video from The History Traveler focused on World War II events, locations, artifacts, etc.
Several Skylighters’ bivouacs in Normandy in the second half of June 1944 were not far from the hamlet of Le Grand Chemin, close to the action at Brecourt Manor depicted in Episode 2 of the HBO miniseries “Band of Brothers.” The Skylighters were moving up the Cotentin Peninsula at the time, with elements on the D14 and N13 “highways” leading toward Cherbourg.
November 5, 2021 …
Another Skylighter passes into the light.
Filed under “Taps” …
LAWRENCE P. BELMONT
November 18, 1923 – November 5, 2021
Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY
Lawrence P. Belmont, a long-time resident of Cliffside Park, Cornwall-on-Hudson, died on Friday, November 5, 2021 at Emerald Peek Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Peekskill, NY, after a brief illness. He was two weeks shy of his 98th birthday.
Born on November 18, 1923, in Walton, NY, the son of Samuel and Angelina (Cicale) Belmont, Lawrence graduated from Walton High School in 1942, where he was a star basketball and football player.
A child of the Great Depression, Lawrence held numerous odd jobs as a youth, delivering the news for a penny a paper, recycling metal, working in several restaurants, and changing the letters on the marquee of Smalley’s Walton Movie Theatre rain or shine. It is said that he taught his entire high school class how to drive Walton’s backroads and main streets in his Model T truck.
Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942, he served with the 225th Antiaircraft Artillery Searchlight Battalion as they fought their way from Omaha Beach across France and Belgium and deep into Germany during World War II. He received four battle stars for the battalion’s campaigns in Normandy, Northern France, the Rhineland, and Central Europe. The 225th used their searchlights and then-top-secret radar sets to establish over 2,000 light canopies and homing beacons, saving an estimated 4,000 Allied aircraft and their crews in darkness and bad weather. By war’s end they were also credited with downing 36 enemy aircraft, including two V-1 buzz bombs. In the summer of 1945, Lawrence was one of a cadre sent to Paris to illuminate the Eiffel Tower with a battery of the unit’s 800-million-candlepower searchlights. For his service, Lawrence was awarded the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, the Victory in Europe Medal, the Army of Occupation Medal, and the U.S. Army Good Conduct Medal.
Following his discharge in 1945, Lawrence returned to Walton, where he was a member of Truman C. Tobey American Legion Post 32, the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 270, and the Walton Veterans Club. He re-enlisted in the U.S Army in 1948, and was stationed in Germany, where he met his future wife, Olga Hanel. They were married in Bad Mergentheim, Germany, in March 1952. After his discharge from the army, Lawrence joined the U.S. Air Force in 1953, serving at Sampson Air Force Base (Geneva, NY), Chateauroux Air Station (France), Langley Air Force Base (Hampton, VA), Ramstein Air Force Base (Germany), and Ellsworth Air Force Base (Rapid City, SD). At each station, he rose steadily up the ranks of the food service squadrons to which he was assigned. At Ramstein, his dining hall was consistently commended for its superior food and restaurant-like atmosphere. From cakes decorated with model planes lined up on butter icing runways complete with candy bar control towers, to giant murals depicting scenes of the surrounding area painted by a local artist, Lawrence’s Dining Hall No. 1 was the talk of the 17th Air Force. At Ellsworth, he supervised the flight-line mess hall that served meals just off the tarmac to the B-52 crews of the Strategic Air Command’s 28th Bomb Wing, airmen that were charged with flying over the United States 24 hours a day and seven days a week during the Cold War. Mike Mansfield, then a U.S. Senator from Montana and frequent visitor to Ellsworth, preferred Lawrence’s “scramble” mess hall to the main one simply because the food was better, as was the view: usually of massive Stratofortresses parked just yards away. Lawrence retired from military service as a Tech Sergeant in August 1966. While in the USAF, he was awarded the Air Force Commendation Medal and the Air Force Good Conduct Medal (twice).
A civilian for good this time, Lawrence moved back to Walton, and then onto Orlando, Florida and Walden, NY before settling down in Cornwall-on-Hudson in June 1969. He worked as a chef/supervisor at the Cadet Mess at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, retiring in 1983 after 15 years of service. He spent his retirement rooting for the Yankees, Knicks, and Jets, watching movies, sitcoms, and political talk shows, and reading the history of the turbulent century into which he was born (“I finally found out where the heck I was during the war”). He enjoyed reading several newspapers from front to back each morning and worked on his computer well into his nineties. He enjoyed listening to the music of the 1930s and 1940s. He rolled his own meatballs and made Wienerschnitzel regularly, a testament to his Italian heritage and a touchstone to his many years spent in Germany.
A frequent attendee of reunions of his former World War II unit, “The Skylighters,” Lawrence never squandered a chance to regale the children and grandchildren of his comrades-in-arms in attendance with tales about the unit’s oft-colorful exploits in Europe. He was a passionate proponent of telling the Latest Generation about the Greatest Generation.
Lawrence was predeceased by his wife, Olga M. (Hanel) Belmont; two brothers: Samuel Belmont, Jr. and John C. Belmont; and a sister: Virginia R. Myers. Survivors include one son, Larry M. Belmont (Elizabeth) of Blue Point, Long Island, NY.
A Mass of Christian Burial will be held at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, November 10th at St. Thomas of Canterbury Church, 340 Hudson Street, Cornwall-On-Hudson, NY. Interment with military honors will follow at St. Thomas Cemetery, Cornwall, NY. There will be no visitation.
In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Alzheimer’s Association (http://alz.org/).
Skylighters in the News
Stony Point “Skylighter” Recalls D-Day
https://www.lohud.com/story/news/local/2015/06/05/stony-point-veteran-recalls-dday/28562313/