Please take a minute to remember the brave men and women of Operation Overlord who helped turn the tide for the Allied forces in Europe. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dday/sfeature/sf_info.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Overlord The Greatest Generation, we will be forever grateful!
Thanks to all youngs americans who died in our beachs in France.Thanks for their sacrifices. We will never forget.......
Thanks Mike. My dad was a wireless air gunner with the RCAF over there. He came back. Good man. Loved him.
Amen to that. Very brave men gave it all just to get on the beach and die by the hundreds, or parachute into a Nazi position, with the Wehrmacht firing up at the defenseless men.
My Great Uncle Frank wasn't in the D-Day landings, but he went ashore afterward. To his dying day, if you even said the name "Spam," he would vomit.
My Grandfather was a Sapper (electrician) who went ashore at Juno Beach in an advance party. He never returned and my father was born some months after his departure. The youngest of 6 kids, I think my father has a greater attachment to his father than any of his siblings despite never having met him. A good friend of mine works with the Juno Beach Centre Association. Every year they round up school teachers and take them over to the Juno Beach Centre and the surrounding areas of Normandy to educate them about the events that took place there. On each trip they take with them as many veterans as they can gather together. He tells me that putting those vets back on the beach where they fought so long ago is a really moving experience. Every where they go, in a bus labeled "Canadian Veterans" everything stops. They have to plan extra time at each stop because French citizens stop whatever they are doing to applaud when the vets get off of the bus. On one trip they were having difficulty locating a particular cemetery. They pulled over and hailed a stereotypical elderly French woman (basket of baguettes over her shoulder even!) for directions. When he explained, in his horrible high-school French, who they were and where they were headed she clung to him and cried for several minutes, thanking him over and over. After receiving directions and getting back on their way they were pulled over by a pair of police cars some time later. It turned out that the woman relayed her experience to her family when she got home and they realized that she had given the directions incorrectly. The family called the police and asked them to find the bus and give the correct direction to the cemetery. The police found them and gave them a lights-blazing escort the rest of the way. If only all North Americans valued our vets as much as the French do!
Including our own Federal Government... Despicable the way they kick them to the curb when they come back injured or troubled with PTSD. And leaving their wives and families destitute. No excuse! No rights to pensions, no help with funerals, heck, sometimes not even a note of condolences. And the Liberals were no different! 400 of our WWII soldiers without tombstones in 2003! Shameless a-holes, then and today!
Thanks for posting this. My Grandfather (He is 93) was a communications specialist in the 82nd Airborne. He doesn't talk about any of the action he saw, only tells anecdotal stories. However, as a History Major and WWII buff, I know what he went through (though I can never personally equate it to a real life experience) I have the upmost respect and admiration for the Men who served in WWII. It never ceases to amaze me how ordinary people were able to achieve such extraordinary things. God Bless them all.
In the immortal words of Sir Winston Churchill after the Battle of Britain, "Never have so many owed so much to so few".
