"Lest we forget"
I once had a retired Army Lt Col as a supervisor. He was a 2nd Lt Graves Registration Officer on D Day. A friend of mine’s father was an Army Chaplain on D Day. You don’t want to know the stories these men told.
Hopefully DJT will visit there for the 75th.
Thanks for posting that!
While assigned to HQ EUCOM, I did a TDY to the 45th Anniversary of D-Day in 1989. It was a fascinating week.
One of my favourite speeches from President Reagan has to be the one he gave at the 1984 commemoration of the 40th anniversary.
And they were sooo young
Today is also the 76th anniversary of the victory at Midway after day 3 of the battle. Every bit as important to the Pacific war as Normandy was to the European theater.
My great uncle on his first mission as a B-24 pilot, took off from England and was shot down into the Channel by British Coastal batteries. The crew was rescued by the British Coast Guard, rushed back to their base, and re-assigned to a different bomb group/squadron, rechristened and painted the B-24 with the crashed one`s name.... They took off, flew to Germany, bombed Hamm, returned to England at night and were shot down while landing by a German nightfighter who was shot down the next night.
Shot down twice in one day in 2 different planes by 2 different countries:
it must be a record of some sort.
Those were their first and last missions.
Years ago when first stationed in Germany I had a neighbor who was a German soldier in Normandy on D Day. He was at one of the British beaches. Like the scene where the German officer looks out from his bunker, he told me that he saw a solid wall of ships from one end of the horizon to another coming straight for him. He also talked about how scared he was. Didn’t really say much else. Two weeks later he was a prisoner of the British, where he learned to speak English.
My adoptive Dad was on Omaha, he was an EOD specialist. He just told me the first week was really busy for him before a mine took him out of action.