June 6th, 1944 - We will not forget

It's hard to remember and to understand the sacrifice these young men gave to us 64 years ago today. President Ronald Reagan said it eloquently on the 40th anniversury of D-Day: "Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here. You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet, you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love."

Ike took a supreme risk in ordering the invasion on June 6th. Despite the heavy losses incurred by the Nazi army on the Eastern Front, it was quite capable of repelling an invasion along the coast of France. Within hours of the landings at D-Day, thousands of telegrams were sent by the War Department that begun, "The War Department regrets to inform you . . ." The liitle town of Bedford, VA sent 103 of its young men off to war. 34 took part in D-Day, 19 died in a matter of minutes. Bedford lost more men per capita than any other town in the United States. News of their deaths reached Bedford six weeks later. A twenty-one-year-old woman called Elizabeth Teass operated the teletype machine. She switched on the teletype machine at 8:30 a.m. on the 16th of July, 1944, and nine names of classmates of hers, boys she'd played stickball with in the 1930s, came chattering through the teletype machine. She waited for them to stop, and they didn't. They just carried on and on. Each name was a separate tragedy, a separate trauma, and she knew every family, as did everybody in that town of 3,000 people. Bedford, Va is now home to the National D-Day Memorial.

But with some luck, deception by the Allies as to where the landings would take place and with favor from God, the Allied war effort was successful.

I have embedded three videos, one of the opening of "Saving Private Rryan", a tribute. and finally, Ike's D-Day speech. I hope you pause to think about their sacrifice.