Not many Freepers remember D-Day but I do. We'd lived up on Portland Street above Bolling Army Air Corps base at the time. Tens of thousands of airmen, pilots and support personnel had been brought through there to receive an encouraging message from he Commander in Chief himself, or the Secretary of War, or any number of top generals. They would then board airplanes and fly to England where they would continue preparing for D-Day.
The flat lands surrounding DC became holy ground as all the planes in the fleet were assembled and given a final check before flying that distance. Many thousands of them were towed by oher planes!
That incessant racket lasted from the time I was born until well after D-Day ~ and the folks on Portland street knew they lived in a very special place. I did myself. Those are my memories of being a baby.
There are some others ~ the first words I can recall my mother saying as she held me outside to watch at sundown are "your daddy's coming home ~ there's his plane!" and he'd waggle the wings, and the plane would roar over our apartment, and within minutes he would, in fact, be home.
Oh, and my dad's plane had a slipstick for "PRESIDENT" so if FDR ever took a military flight he'd been on that one ~ pressurized with a finished interior ~ for a while the finest plane in the Air Corps ~ all that other stuff was built after that plane. America started from ground zero and built up ~ and met the challenge. I was there. I saw that happen.