D-Day

We travelled to Normandy for the 65th commemoration of the 6JUN44 landings. I noticed that some of the headstones were more legible than others.....after closer examination, you could see the sand drying and falling to the ground in front of the marker. People had gathered sand from the beach and rubbed it into the carvings on the stones.....

Jackie Speier on Twitter: "Visited the grave of my friend’s father and witnessed a remarkable ceremony. The letters on the white crosses almost disappear in the brightness of the stone, so a soldier fills the indentations with sand from Omaha Beach to bring the name forward. It sent shivers down my spine.… https://t.co/2IPT4JIJgW"

A good friend went to Normandy for the 70th anniversary. He had been once before on June 5th 1944 parachuting behind enemy lines the night before. Anyway, we lost him a few years ago at 94. Wish he was here for the 75th. He would have loved Trump's speech and been in the front row.

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Rexedgar said:

We travelled to Normandy for the 65th commemoration of the 6JUN44 landings. I noticed that some of the headstones were more legible than others.....after closer examination, you could see the sand drying and falling to the ground in front of the marker. People had gathered sand from the beach and rubbed it into the carvings on the stones.....

Jackie Speier on Twitter: "Visited the grave of my friend’s father and witnessed a remarkable ceremony. The letters on the white crosses almost disappear in the brightness of the stone, so a soldier fills the indentations with sand from Omaha Beach to bring the name forward. It sent shivers down my spine.… https://t.co/2IPT4JIJgW"

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My Aunt is there right now, she took this pic:



Why?

Tomorrow will be 75 years since my dad landed on Utah Beach as part of the 90th Infantry’s “Tough ‘Ombres” on his way to the Battle of the Bulge.

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Renae said:

My Aunt is there right now, she took this pic:

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Why?

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There was a whole lotta war between landing @ Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge!

Rexedgar said:

There was a whole lotta war between landing @ Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge!

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Yep, and grampa was there. His unit liberated one of the first concentration camps too.

Rexedgar said:

There was a whole lotta war between landing @ Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge!

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Yeah, alone before that (End August, when the Germans retreated across the Seine) Allied casualties (killed, wounded and missing) are estimated to have reached 209,000.

At least 50,000 killed.

After that, in the Ardennes (the Bulge) far more died than on D-Day and the days immediately after.

Actually far more died at Anzio in January that year (actually from Jan to May), when their amphibious landing was entrapped by the Germans and it took them til May to break out, once the initial strength of 36,000 men (far too weak) had been increased to round about the same number we had in Normandy from the start.

Not to belittle the bravery of Normandy at all, it makes Anzio unjustly fade in memory as much as the even more terrible Monte Cassino.

I guess the strategic impact of Normandy succeeding has allways been seen as bigger than all the rest.