[PLUG-TALK] D-Day, 75 years ago

[Keith Lofstrom]

While few of us are old enough to remember the Normandy 
invasion in 1944, some of us have fathers or grandfathers
who were involved. 

The first airborne landings started at 0015 June 6, which
is 1515 June 5 (330 pm) Pacific Daylight Time 75 years
ago today (9 hours time difference to Caen in Normandy,
France).  The first US landing craft arrived on Omaha and
Utah beaches at 0630 June 6, which is 2130 (930 pm PDT)
tonight.   The fighting near Omaha beach (with concrete
strongpoints atop 120 foot cliffs) continued for days,
but huge US, British, Canadian, and Free French forces
were inland of all beaches by nightfall.  

Over the next three weeks, the allies landed 1.3 million
troops through the beaches, with 120,000 casualties (9%),
about half of those in the first few hours.

Cornelius Ryan wrote the bestseller "The Longest Day" 
about the invasion, which was made into a movie in 1962.
I vaguely remember watching that with my parents at the
Beaverton Drive-in.  I found the DVD and may watch it
again tonight.

My father wasn't sent to Europe; he was training with an
artillery unit scheduled to invade Japan in November 1945,
along with 6 million other allied troops.  They would have
faced 4 million Japanese regulars and 32 million civilian
conscripts; the Japanese would not have surrendered, so
expected casualties would have been at least a million
dead allied troops (many from suicide attacks) and tens of
millions of dead Japanese, mostly from aerial firebombing. 

My father and my wife's father weren't assault troops,
but the risks were high, and the lifelong emotional scars
from their brutal work would have resulted in a brutal
childhood for us.  That would have been vastly worse than
the ending we got, though the subsequent "peace" (and
US-Russian relations) could have been managed far better.

But that's another story.  The story in Europe took many
more decades to resolve, but they are in much better shape
75 years later.  The Normandy invasion helped a lot.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com