Editing Dirk Bogarde (section)

===D-Day and aftermath===
Bogarde served as an intelligence officer with [[Field Marshal]] [[Bernard Montgomery]]'s 21st Army Group as it liberated Europe.<ref name="Military">{{Cite web |date=16 March 2021 |title=The Military Man behind the Matinee Idol |url=https://www.keymilitary.com/article/military-man-behind-matinee-idol |access-date=31 October 2022 |website=KeyMilitary.com}}</ref> Taylor Downing's book, ''Spies in the Sky'', tells of Bogarde's work in photo-reconnaissance in the aftermath of [[Operation Overlord|D-Day]], moving through [[Normandy]] with [[Royal Canadian Air Force]] units. By July 1944, they were located at the [[Advanced Landing Ground#Royal Air Force ALGs|"B.8"]] airfield at [[Sommervieu]], near [[Bayeux]]. As an air photographic interpreter with the rank of [[Captain (British Army and Royal Marines)|captain]], Bogarde was later attached to the [[Second Army (United Kingdom)|Second Army]], where he selected ground targets in France, Holland and Germany for the [[RAF Second Tactical Air Force|Second Tactical Air Force]] and [[RAF Bomber Command]].<ref name="Above The Title 1986">''Above The Title'', Yorkshire Television interview, 1986.</ref> Villages on key routes were heavily bombed to prevent the [[Wehrmacht]]'s [[Tank|armour]] from reaching the invasion [[lodgement]] areas.<ref> Bogarde states that before a village was bombed by the RAF they would always drop leaflets warning the inhabitants but that sometimes the leaflets were blown away by the wind. Other air forces allocated to these same tasks, he states, "didn't drop leaflets, they just bombed everything that moved".</ref> In a 1986 [[Yorkshire Television]] interview with [[Russell Harty]], Bogarde recalled going on [[Watercolor painting|painting]] trips, sometimes to see the villages which he had selected as targets:
{{blockquote|I found what I had thought in the rubble were a whole row of [[Ball (association football)|footballs]], and they weren't footballs ... they were children's heads ... A whole school of kids, a [[convent]], had been pulled out of school, and lined up in this little narrow alleyway between the buildings to save them from the bombing, and the whole thing had come in on top of them.<ref name="Above The Title 1986"/>}}