One of Northern Ireland’s best-kept World War II secrets is located in a dimly lit cellar deep within a centuries-old castle.
Its basement walls have served as a blank canvas for hundreds of handwritten messages from American soldiers training for D-Day over the course of eight decades.
Just beyond Cookstown, Killymoon Castle was crucial to the war effort from December 1943 to February 1944.
It served as the US Army’s 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment’s base.
The GIs in New Ireland
The British have been fighting Nazi Germany without their strongest ally until 1942.
All of that changed with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and between 1943 and 1944, the first wave of American troops arrived in the British Isles.
By the end of the war, an estimated 300,000 American military personnel were stationed in Northern Ireland.
The American army had more than 600 soldiers stationed at Killymoon Castle.
Many of them belonged to a top-tier parachute unit that would be crucial to the outcome of the conflict.
After spending three months in Killymoon Castle, they were sent to England to finish up the landing operation in France, which would go down in history as D-Day.
Fifty-three of the paratroopers who stayed at Killymoon had perished before the end of World War Two.
“It’s a piece of history,” but the US soldiers who lodged at the isolated Castle in County Tyrone made a lasting impression.
