The Longest Day - June 6, 1944

Normandy Beach Memorial, France.

"It is the young men born into the false prosperity of the 1920s and brought up in the bitter realities of the Depression of the 1930s...The literature they read as youngsters was antiwar, cynical, portraying patriots as suckers, slackers as heroes. None of them wanted to be part of another war. They wanted to be throwing baseballs, not hand grenades, shooting .22s at rabbits, not M-1s at other young men. But when the test came, when freedom had to be fought for or abandoned, they fought. They were soldiers of democracy. They were the men of D-Day."

-- from Stepehen E. Ambrose "D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II."


Note: D-Day began at midnight, June5/6, 1944, when the first British and American airborne troops jumped into France to launch the invasion to liberate Europe from Nazi Germany. It ended at midnight June6/7, 1944.