“Still on the whole we have very much to thank God for this day.”¹⁰

ONE SOLDIER WHO did not forget to thank God was Lt. Richard Winters, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne. At 0001 on June 6, he had been in a C-47 headed to Normandy. He had prayed the whole way over, prayed to live through the day, prayed that he wouldn’t fail.

He didn’t fail. He won the DSC that morning.

At 2400 on June 6, before bedding down at Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, Winters (as he later wrote in his diary) “did not forget to get on my knees and thank God for helping me to live through this day and ask for His help on D plus one.” And he made a promise to himself: if he lived through the war, he was going to find an isolated farm somewhere and spend the remainder of his life in peace and quiet. In 1951 he got the farm, in south-central Pennsylvania, where he lives today.¹¹

“WHEN CAN THEIR GLORY FADE?” Tennyson asked about the Light Brigade, and so ask I about the men of D-Day.

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wondered.

Honor the charge they made!

General Eisenhower, who started it all with his “OK, let’s go” order, gets the last word. In 1964, on D-Day plus twenty years, he was interviewed on Omaha Beach by Walter Cronkite.

Looking out at the Channel, Eisenhower said, “You see these people out here swimming and sailing their little pleasure boats and taking advantage of the nice weather and the lovely beach, Walter, and it is almost unreal to look at it today and remember what it was.