D-Day

[PhilDernerJr]

Today being June 6, I wnat everyone to remember the 9,000 ment hat gave their lives to begin the liberating of Europe in 1944.

The History Channel will have D-Day related programs all day, and I urge you folks to check them out.

Of all the warfare I've learned and read about, few battles sounds is grisly and horrific as D-Day. For these men to walk/swim/float into fire liek they did took an amount of courage that I couldnn't imagine myself ever having.

Put your flags out today and remember.

[Midnight Mike]

Thanks Phil, good information about the History channel!

[Midnight Mike]

http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/brochures/no ... or-pam.htm (http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/brochures/normandy/nor-pam.htm)


A great invasion force stood off the Normandy coast of France as dawn broke on 6 June 1944: 9 battleships, 23 cruisers, 104 destroyers, and 71 large landing craft of various descriptions as well as troop transports, mine sweepers, and merchantmen—in all, nearly 5,000 ships of every type, the largest armada ever assembled.

The naval bombardment that began at 0550 that morning detonated large minefields along the shoreline and destroyed a number of the enemy’s defensive positions.

To one correspondent, reporting from the deck of the cruiser HMS Hillary, it sounded like “the rhythmic beating of a gigantic drum” all along the coast. In the hours following the bombardment, more than 100,000 fighting men swept ashore to begin one of the epic assaults of history, a “mighty endeavor,” as President Franklin D. Roosevelt described it to the American people, “to preserve … our civilization and to set free a suffering humanity.”

The attack had been long in coming. From the moment British forces had been forced to withdraw from France in 1940 in the face of an overwhelming German onslaught, planners had plotted a return to the Continent. Only in that way would the Allies be able to confront the enemy’s power on the ground, liberate northwestern Europe, and put an end to the Nazi regime.


Those who did survive D-Day, and those who didn’t, should never be forgotten.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v726/MidnightMike/7493e279.jpg

[AirtrafficController]

I love military history and I will tune in