And it lasted with his penciled notations intact as he directed men coming ashore in France on D-Day, June 6, 1944, yelling into his megaphone: “Move Forward!”
Joseph P. Vaghi Jr., a Bethesda architect who died in 2012 at the age of 92, cherished the map in the years after the war. Its meticulous detail had saved his life, he told his family.
On June 27, Vaghi’s family formally donated the map to the Library of Congress, where it was hailed as a rare artifact from one of World War II’s most historic events.
“It’s a miracle of mapmaking,” said Robert Morris, the library’s cartographic acquisitions specialist.
It contains a rendering of the Normandy coast, showing topography, sand dunes, hedges, houses, cemeteries, mud flats, villages, orchards, water depths, tidal charts and the “Easy Red” sector of Omaha Beach where Vaghi landed.
It also includes a sketch at the bottom of what the terrain looked like from an approaching landing ship.
More than 2,500 Americans were killed that day, along with 1,913 British, Canadian and other allied soldiers and sailors, according to the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Va.
It seemed a miracle that Vaghi survived, a Navy buddy later told his son.
“It was almost like something protected him,” Vaghi’s son, Joseph P. Vaghi III, said his father’s friend related. “He was a tall man. … He had a megaphone. He was up and down the beach. … How he didn’t get killed no one knows to this day.”
Vaghi, a lieutenant commander, was a Navy “Beachmaster.” Equipped with his map and other equipment, his job was to direct the traffic of thousands of men and tons of material pouring onto the beach amid the enemy’s artillery and machine-gun fire. He was 23.
The military map he carried, based on intelligence and low-level reconnaissance flights, was labeled “TOP SECRET” in green letters.
The D-Day landing area on the northwest coast of France, where the allies assaulted occupying German forces in 1944, was divided into five beach sectors code named Omaha, Utah, Gold, Juno and Sword.
The Americans attacked Utah and heavily defended Omaha.
The beaches were divided into smaller sectors such as Easy Red, Easy Green and Fox Green. The maps were designed to guide soldiers and sailors to the proper landing zones and give them an idea of the lay of the land once they arrived.
Easy Red was defended by three German bunkers, two of which were made of stone and concrete, according to historian Peter Caddick-Adams.
“The Germans were in their pillboxes and bunkers high above the beach on the bluff and had an unobstructed view of what we were doing,” Vaghi recalled in a later account for the U.S. 6th Naval Beach Battalion website. “The atmosphere was depressing.”
The map still has the pencil notations he made.
“LCI will beach here,” he scribbled on one spot, referring to the Landing Craft Infantry vessel that was to land him and others, not far from where the Normandy American Cemetery is today.
Morris said, “All these pencil annotations are contemporary, and he would have made them either prior, probably just prior, in preparation for the landing.”
The map is in color, printed on two sides, and is creased and tattered with age.
“He was a survivor,” Morris said as he recently examined the map” in a library vault. “And this is a survivor.
“We have a lot of maps relating to wars, obviously,” he said. “War is a great mapmaking business. But to my knowledge we have none that actually we can document went on to D-Day. That’s what makes this a particularly special piece.”
“Thankfully,…
Read More: Top secret D-day map of Omaha beach goes to the Library of Congress.
