This Day of Days. Thanks for posting PK. I always wax philosophical and in awe every year in this week from Memorial Day to Invasion Day, so please give me some leeway as I know many of the readers are of a similar age and remember calendars of their youth still annotating V-E and V-J days. 

Inevitable and anticipated by the world for three years, an event so complex and expansive its impossible to grasp, as is the courage required to jump into water and wade to an exposed, wide-open beach under the clear line of fire of multiple, hardened MG-42 positions. 

Pre-dawn bombing runs were supposed to soften the German defensive positions as well as create craters in the beach to provide cover.  They missed the target area badly, impacting neither the beach nor the concrete bunkers.  Tanks were also supposed to land with the soldiers at Omaha Beach to provide cover from the machine guns for the infantry, but only 2 arrived and late, further leaving the soldiers wholly exposed.

From the rural county of Bedford, Virginia, with a population of 7,000, 24 sons deployed to England.  Of the 23 that participated in the Omaha Beach landing, 19 were killed in the first 30 minutes, and 3 more during the invasion.  The only survivor, Lt Ray Nance, was a pharmacist who lived out his life in Bedford and died in 2009 at about age 90, in his words haunted each day of his life why he was the only one to live.  Of the 2400 American casualties at Omaha, Bedford County experienced by far the highest casualty rate per capita of any location in the country.  The National D-Day Memorial was completed more than a decade ago on a hilltop in Bedford village.

Brigadier General Teddy Roosevelt, Jr. and his soldiers landed in Utah Beach somewhat off course due to high currents, and suffered few casualties.

The brutality and chaos of this Day of Days is represented more accurately in Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers than in older movies such as The Longest Day, although that was a phenomenal cinematic accomplishment for its era of 1962, with thousands of extras, no CGI and all stunts physically executed and filmed.

Visiting any of the Normandy cemeteries is one of the most sobering experiences one can have, and it stays with you. 

I was stationed in extreme western Germany near the Belgian and Luxembourg borders, and visited this American cemetery near Luxembourg city on a couple of Memorial Days.  It is the resting place for thousands killed in the Bulge and Ardennes campaigns, and General Patton.

Thanks for reading.

Seeing photos and videos from the day always amazes me in so many ways.  I can only imagine the feelings of the young men who were packed tightly onto those ships, only to be released onto a beach with no cover.  It's a day that's always caused me to pause and think about a singular event that had such large ramifications.