Today In History: D-Day/The Battle Of Normandy
Sixty-three years ago on this day allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy in what is still, to this day, the largest seaborne invasion in the history of the world. Just a little historical oddity, but the name for the overall operation to retake Western Europe from Hitler's Nazis was Operation Overlord. The name for the actual June 6th invasion of Normandy was Operation Neptune. Neptune began on June 6, 1944, and ended 24 days later on June 30th. The allied forces suffered about 10,000 causalities on D-Day. About 2500 of those casualties were deaths. The U.S. forces casualty figure was 6,603, inducing 1,465 dead, 3,184 wounded, 1928 missing and 26 captured.
There was a time when you didn't have to engage in a mini history lesson on D-Day. This was something the American people were actually taught in school, or something they remembered personally. Not so today, unfortunately. If you care to know more here are some links from the D-Day Museum and from Wikipedia that seem very thorough.
I don't think you can say enough about the men who stormed the beach. I wanted to put some old D-Day video here but some don't allow embedding. Here's the links:
As the Allies were landing on the beach, President FDR was saying a prayer on the radio. The prayer can be found here.
