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June 06, 2012
D-Day June 6th, 1944 Normandy France
It was on 6th June 1944 that Operation Overlord - the long anticipated Allied invasion of Nazi-held Europe - went into action. What came to be known as the 'D-day landings'.
On the French beaches and in those hedgerows, many making the ultimate sacrifice. Over two thousand Americans, British, Canadians, and Australians died that first day, trading their lives for a single ambition...so we could live free.
The allied commander of the D-Day invasion, Gen Dwight D Eisenhower gives the order of the Day.
"Full victory - nothing else" to paratroopers in England, just before they board their airplanes to participate in the first assault in the invasion of the continent of Europe.
….”In some sectors the area was so heavily occupied by the Germans the paratroopers were fired upon while in the plane, in decent, and after landing... Many men were wounded or killed during one phase or another... The illumination created by fires on the ground was a death sentence if you were caught in an open field... This great confusion created by the troopers, moving in all directions, completely baffled the Germans in that they could not establish how many allied paratroopers had landed, or determine where our front line was. The fact that we were scattered over many miles, (mistakenly,) became advantageous to our mission..”
The first wave of assault troops of the 29th Infantry Division, it was four rifle companies landing on a hostile shore at H-hour, D-Day - 6:30 a.m., on June 6, 1944
The long-awaited liberation of France was underway. After long months in England, National Guardsmen from Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia found themselves in the vanguard of the Allied attack. In those early hours on the fire-swept beach the 116th Infantry Combat Team, the old Stonewall Brigade of Virginia, clawed its way through Les Moulins draw toward its objective, Vierville-sur-Mer. It was during the movement from Les Moulins that the battered but gallant 2d Battalion broke loose from the beach, clambered over the embankment, and a small party, led by the battalion commander, fought its way to a farmhouse, which became its first Command Post in France.
Wild Thing's comment .......
We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to those who gave their lives in this giant struggle and to those who were lucky enough to come back home.
We can only imagine the horror and the dying that took place. We need to perpetuate their story of sacrifice and glory for as long as we live.
Can you see the thousands of ships offshore that formed the most powerful armada that the world has ever seen? A huge salvo is being laid down prior to the invasion. Troops climb down rope ladders into landing craft. Many invasion force craft are circling around, grouping up, just before they make their final drive for the beach.
The Germans are entrenched in concrete bunkers and gun emplacements and are shelling the approaching landing craft. Many men never make it to the beach, but instead die in the churning surf. Those who do get to the beach and tumble out of their craft are subject to horrendous machine gun fire from pillboxes that rake the entire shore. There are the dead and the dying.
Valiant army engineers mount a superhuman effort to blow a hole in the concrete barricade so troops can move inland, away from the murderous fire coming from above them.
Those first few hours must have indeed been some of the longest ever faced by bold and courageous men. May their honor and sacrifice not be forgotten, and may this event in history go down not as just about death and dying, but as a turning point for the world, toward peace. God willing, it will never have to be repeated.
Posted by Wild Thing at June 6, 2012 09:46 AM
Comments
9,000 men gave their lives on just that day.
Posted by: BobF at June 6, 2012 11:08 AM
"Full victory, nothing else". We haven't heard that since WWII. How sad. Good men and women paid the price in WWII to halt the spread of facism and set millions free. Since WWII many other good men and women have sacrificed to help free other millions, but politics have prevented "full victory". Even in the first Gulf War total victory was denied at the last hours for political reasons, slogan and gain.
An amazing fact about the D-Day landings was that for the majority of the American landing forces it was their first combat. Good training and a belief in their cause led them to face the fire and drive on to victory.
Posted by: TomR, armed in Texas at June 6, 2012 11:53 AM
Absent any statement to commemorate, not a single word from these revisionists of America’s good and noble history, these Citizens of the World that currently occupy the White House in 2012 with their failed folly of fundamental change,
On this 6th of June 2012, the 68th anniversary of the greatest armada ever assembled in the history of the world, a valiant victory and the greatest liberation ever in the defense of freedom;
it’s good, fitting and proper to pause, listen and read along with one real and very proud American who in his position as President always commemorated D-Day,
and on the 40th anniversary of D-Day in 1984 travelled there to Normandy and spoke on site of the Rangers that took the cliffs, “the boys of Pointe du Hoc”,
Ronald Reagan in his own words:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronaldreaganddayaddress.html
If you're interested, the three best books on D-Day are:
Cross-Channel Attack: United States Army in World War II andThe European Theater of Operations by Gordon A. Harrison (1951)
The Struggle for Europe by Austrailian War Correspondent Chester Wilmott (1952)
Victory In The West Volume I: The Battle Of Normandy by Bristish Major L. F. Ellis (1962)
Less military history, and more oral history based accounts about people interviewed are of course the more popular, The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan (1959) which was made into the 1962 war film, and the over publicized, D-Day June 6, 1944 by Stephen Ambrose (1995).
Posted by: Carlos at June 6, 2012 03:16 PM
And of course our "Warrior" transsexual POTUS has completely ignored one of the most important military operations in American history.
To he and his merry & gay band of scrotum abusers, the building of the guillotines in front of 1600 cannot come fast enough.
Posted by: cuchieddie (on Obamba's Hit List) at June 6, 2012 03:52 PM
Thank you everyone so very much.
Carlos, thank you for the added information and link to Reagan's awesome speech.
Posted by: Wild Thing at June 7, 2012 01:51 AM
