DAKS over Normandy

[Rick]

Today, June 5, a very large group of men and women followed in the footsteps of the Greatest Generation! About 250 men and women boarded aircraft in the United Kingdom to, exactly like 75 years before, fly across the English Channel and to jump into the historic drop zones of Normandy. They wore WWII style Allied uniforms and jumped with military round parachutes. They flew aboard a mix of 34 DC3 and C47 aircraft with spitfire flying escort. There were Royal Navy vessels offshore at Normandy as the aircraft flew over. This will be the last year the DAKS reenactment will be carried out.

As June 6 dawns, let us remember those brave men that were already on the shores of Europe as pathfinder paratroopers and the resistance fighters who were all engaged in combat and the men who would be wading ashore amidst the furry of war we cannot possibly image.

[crashdive123]

What they did, and how they did it is almost unfathomable. God bless them all.

[Seniorman]

Thankfully, Adolph Hitler did not listen to Gen. Erwin Rommel advising about Normandy. If he had, and given the many, many things that went wrong that morning with the Allied landings, both in planning and unforeseen circumstances, the landing might well have failed.

I was a child at that time and I still remember all the newsreels and radio news accounts of the Normandy invasion. There was a young man in the small rural town in which I grew up, who was a member of the 2nd Ranger Battalion. He was killed that morning. As were so many. Scared but brave, they carried out their mission. God bless America and God bless the American Soldier.

S.M.

[chiggersngrits]

"God bless America and God bless the American Soldier." Amen to that brother.

[crashdive123]

I listened to a very sombering interview today from one of the brave men at Normandy. He said it was like a turkey shoot. The only reason we prevailed was because we had more men than they had bullets.

[Alan R McDaniel Jr]

It was a "bet the farm" gamble. Even with the secrecy and deception pulled off by the allies kept what was monumental losses to much less than it would have been if the Germans had known for sure the invasion was coming where it did. If the invasion had failed, the war would have been very much protracted, if not lost. We did this while fighting another equally as determined enemy on the other ocean.

I often wonder about the resolve of what is now the United States, were we faced with the same situation. There was no family in America left unscarred by WWII.

When certain people talk about making America Great again, I believe they are talking about an America with the grit to face a do or die situation and DO, and prevail regardless of the losses sustained.

Those men who dropped into France, went ashore early, crashed gliders and the thousands who waded into the waves (both the ocean and machine gun), were truly men, American men who were from a Great America. They did not turn and run, they did not give up, they did not lose their resolve. I don't think they even knew how to lose.

We owe them our existence. If they had lost, we would have surely fought the Germans here from the East and the Japanese from the West. The America we know today would not exist.

We need to keep making America Great Again, until we are. The Snowflakes that make up half of this country would soil themselves running to their safe place if they were faced with a mediocre German soldier of WWII.

D-Day was The Day that America saved the world.

May God bless and keep those who fell, and have mercy on our souls if we ever forget them.

Alan

[Rick]

I had an uncle wounded in both legs as he went ashore on Tinian. He made it past the beachhead before he was wounded. He laid there that day, all night and was not rescued until the next day. I do not think I posses that level of grit. Every male in my family of that generation served in some theater with one uncle being captured at the Battle of the Bulge. I grew up on hushed stories of what men were in that age. I think all of them wore size 48 boots. I know I could never fill them. I really did grow up with heroes.