D-Day: From the Normandy Beaches to the Liberation of France

D-Day: From the Normandy Beaches to the Liberation of France is a nice book to have. It's got relatively accurate information about the 1944 D-Day invasions, as well as many very interesting photographs. Unfortunately, this is overshadowed by some glaring examples of carelessness when it comes to captioning images. Now, for the average normal person, that wouldn't really matter too much. But I am no average normal person.

I've compiled a list of some of the errors I found while flipping through this book. Some of them are actually quite funny.

On pages 48-49, image 3 depicts an airfield in England with numerous Halifax bombers ready to tow a large number of Hamilcar gliders. The caption, however, says that they are Horsa gliders. While there are two Horsa gliders at the front of the group, every single other glider in the image is a Hamilcar. While the caption technically isn't wrong, it could mislead some people.

The image in question. Note that there are only two Horsa gliders in the entire photo.

There are actually two errors on pages 56-57. Image 2 on page 56's caption says that the crashed glider pictured is a Waco CG-4, when it is very clearly a British Horsa glider. The shapes of the Waco and the Horsa are vastly different, as are the paint schemes, so this error should have easily been avoided.
In the caption for image 6 on pages 56-57, the caption says that the photo depicts a crashed American Waco CG-4 glider, but again it is a Horsa. Now, for this one, I can see why they may have slipped up. The glider has American markings, so they likely assumed that if it had American markings that it was a Waco. In fact, the U.S. operated a number of Horsa gliders during the D-Day invasion, one of which is shown in this image.

Image 2 on page 56.

Image 6 on pages 56-57.

On page 199, the caption for image 5 implies that the pictured tank turret is from a tank destroyed during the Normandy invasion. A quick Google image search tells us that this turret was not from a destroyed tank, but rather one of the Wehrmacht's unusual tank turret batteries, which consisted of simply removing the turret from a tank and burying it in the ground, providing a simple but effective gun emplacement. I was also able to find the exact model of tank this turret is from. It was originally the turret on a prototype German tank known as the VK 30.01(H), which was rejected for production because it was outdated. The turret from the working prototype, however, was used for this gun emplacement on Omaha Beach, as part of the Atlantic Wall's fortifications.

The offending image...

A photograph of the VK 30.01(H) prototype.