Like a lot of people in my generation, I learned about D-Day from “Saving Private Ryan” and “Band of Brothers.” We weren’t there, and we weren’t alive when it happened.
My interest in WWII, from what led to war, to how it ended and then how we still see the effects today started as a teenager watching those flicks. I wanted to be a soldier as a teenager. I wanted to prove myself on the battlefield like those my age did generations before. I never did enlist, however, though my interest in war and my gratitude towards those who served remain as high as ever.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Allied invasion in the north of France, known as Operation Neptune, part of the overall battle of Normandy known as Operation Overlord. Americans landed at code named Utah and Omaha beaches, while the Britons went in at Sword and Gold beaches and the Canadians at Juno Beach.
Some 8,000 men perished on Normandy shores the morning of June 6, 1944, with nearly 20,000 casualties in all. The invasion used more than 1,200 planes, 5,000 sea vessels and nearly 160,000 troops to cross the English Channel. The success of the invasion put more than 2 million allied troops on the ground in France in less than three months. The war in Europe, which had been fought for over four years at that point, would be over in less than a year.
From the strategy of where and when to invade, to the mass amount of training, reconnaissance, man and vehicle power, to the sheer will of those soldiers to fight off Hitler’s Atlantic Wall is astonishing. There were a lot of moving parts, and the invasion was far from a guaranteed success.
As the years go by, survivors of D-Day are getting harder to find. Hearing their stories of how the events unfolded, stories of their men and fellow troopers and how the war changed them always grabs my full attention.
“Band of Brothers” is my favorite series on the subject. I’ve watched it a few dozen times, and it is mandatory viewing on either D-Day or the next available day for a full-series binge. My eldest daughter has taken a liking to the series and has sat through it with me twice. It’s kind of a good bonding experience, and whenever she has questions, we pause it and search Google for answers or context.
I talk a lot around the house of one day taking the kids to Europe, touring sites both happy and fun, as well as the sad and sinister. When I spent a summer in Germany in 2003, I remember touring the Dachau concentration camp. It is a harrowing experience that cuts you to your core mentally and emotionally and changes who you are as a person. The men of Easy Company, in the 101st Airborne depicted in “Band of Brothers,” were the ones who liberated Dachau, but that’s not why I toured the museum.
Touring Europe that summer I saw the ruins of Rome, the Renaissance churches and streets of Florence, the quaint villages of Switzerland and recovering cities in Czech Republic. I stopped by Checkpoint Charlie and saw parts of the leftover Berlin Wall. This all fascinated me and gave me a better understanding of not just the world in general, but the world our Americans helped save nearly a century ago.
My parents, who graciously funded my trip 16 years ago and joined me for a few weeks in Germany, recently went back to Europe and toured the areas of Omaha Beach, Utah Beach and the sites, cities and cemeteries that played a major part in the invasion.
I was envious of their trip, and was interested in hearing the details of their trip. Before they went, I found a roll call of deceased soldiers from Green and Lafayette Counties so they might have had names to match with graves. I was surprised to see just 23 names listed for Green County deceased in WWII, and 39 from Lafayette. Maybe I only found one roll of many lists from the State of Wisconsin, I only dug online for about an hour before they left.
And yet, here we are, 75 years after the day the world changed forever. Those soldiers of the greatest generation fought against tyranny, oppression and persecution. They fought for their families, their country and their ancestors against a sinister regime hell bent on controlling the world. Their heroism led to the end of the war and a booming economy that made our country the envy of the world.
Everything that happened after WWII at home — and abroad — is another story for another day. But D-Day changed everything. It wasn’t one bomb, or two, like what was dropped on Japan to end the war, or one political assassination, like what kickstarted WWI, which inevitably led to WWII. D-Day was a collective effort of hundreds of thousands of soldiers rising above the threat of death and saving our world.
We should never forget that sacrifice.
— Adam Krebs is a reporter for the Times and can be reached at akrebs@themonroetimes.net.
