D-Day: I Cannot Imagine .....

I cannot imagine what it must have been like to cross this expanse of sand now known as Omaha Beach which must have looked like miles of open space to those warriors who jumped into deep water with enormous weights strapped on their back to start wading/swimming/paddling/dodging the firepower coming at them as they jumped into the Channel.

(Photo by author, July 2019)

I cannot imagine what it must have been like to look over at the next landing craft which you knew carried some of your best friends you had made while preparing for this day blown to hell and back.

I cannot imagine the last thoughts of those who faced the purest terror known to mankind, the Nazis, comfortably ensconced in their ten-foot walls of concrete bunkers above the beach, firing at will with every imaginable firearm made available by a desperate Hitler and Rommel.

I cannot imagine what it must have been like to think theese are my last minutes, last moments, last seconds, of life and to imagine leaving your little children and wife and lovely home somewhere you had both worked so hard to acquire to have it all taken away by-if you were lucky-one piece of lead coming at you unheard, unseen, invisible until it entered your head, exploding it and ending whatever life you may have dreamed of.

I cannot imagine what it must have been like, if I were one of the rare ones blessed with survival up to the mid-beach area, to look over and see my brother-in-arms turned into a pink mist by the incessant, uniterrupted stream of machine gun fire from those bunkers up the hill.

I cannot imagine the almost terminal surrender which must have gone thorugh my mind if I were one of the rare ones to make it up to the brush and tangled weeds covering the bluffs of Normandy there above Omaha Beach, and similar incredibly difficult terrain at Utah Beach, Sword Beach, Gold Beach and Juno Beach.

I cannot imagine the courage, dedication to mission, the sheer, absolute devotion to duty it must have taken to be in one of the most miraculous contingents of warriors ever put together in one battle, The Rangers, who sacaled the sheer cliffs of Pointe du Hoc under intense fire which took most of those heroic Rangers out, but who reached the pinnacle and whose efforts were remembered by President Ronald Reagan on the 40th Anniversary of D-Day in a speech which was one of the most moving remembrances in American history;

I can’t imagine what it must be like for those few dozen survivors of June 6, 1944, to know that not only my time is near but that the time within which the world will remember what we did there is slowly but surely coming to an end; imagine how that must feel if you survived that hell on earth and were willing to give your life for a dream that is beginning to fade away. I cannot imagine how that must feel.

But as hard as it is to imagine what it must have been like on those miles-wide beaches of Normandy on that day in June 1044, I am heartned by the knowledge that many still remember our sacrifice in many commemerations which will be held tomorrow on the anniversary of that day on which, as King Charles said today in Portsmouth, they replaced “tyranny with freedom” and many other memorials accross the land in England and France.

I may not be able to imagine all these things from the vantage of the peaceful, serene, relatively secure, liberty and freedom based life they have given me through their unimaginable sacrfice but I can send to them my eternal, lasting, boundless and everlasting appreciation for what they endured so that we might be free.

I salute them with all the gratitude God has blessed me with and with every single bit of love I have for those who, in the truest sense of the phrase, saved the world-and us- from the slavery and cruelty of fascism.

I salute and thank the Warriors of June 6, 1944.

I thank them for their inestimable service.

May God Bless them and keep them in eternal life, and make light perpetual shine upon them.