Two years ago, my wife and I spent some time visiting the sacred grounds of real sacrifice for a real cause. On the Normandy beaches of D-Day, we stood where Americans, Brits, and Canadians mounted the largest, most ambitious and bloodiest amphibious invasion in history. I stood on a deserted, quiet, and peaceful Omaha Beach with the haunting memory that on June 6, 1944, the sand under my feet was red with the blood of Americans from my father’s generation who, if they survived the constant machine gun fire from Nazi gun nests, huddled against a seawall and eventually climbed those hills to liberate France and eventually the world.
As we participated in the flag lowering ceremony at the end of the day in the American Battlefield Memorial Ceremony at Omaha Beach, the carefully lined crosses represented the thousands for whom sacrifice was more than a percentage of their income—it was 100% of their own hopes, dreams, and lives — buried in France on land Americans proudly and respectfully oversee to preserve the dignity of the deaths. Stuart Robertson, a local historian who spent the day with us, took us to St. Mere Eglise, where American private John Steele parachuted as part of the airborne operation, and whose parachute got caught on the steeple of the church in the center of the town, a scene immortalized in the classic film “The Longest Day.”
What they came to fight was made clearer as we made our way to Poland, and visited the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. To stand in the very room where more than a million and half fellow human beings were murdered in an attempt to annihilate the entire Jewish population was sobering.
This anniversary of D-Day please remember the men who fought and died for us on June 6th, 1944 and what they were fighting for.
With the deepest gratitude,
