Volume 11 , Issue 23

65 Years Ago

This weekend, June 6, 2009, was the celebration of the 65th Anniversary of D-Day at Normandy Beach, on the coast of France. This is the online link that has more information about D-Day, June 6, 1944.

My Uncle Bob McGill did not storm the beaches of Normandy on that day. Uncle Bob was about to graduate from Officers candidate school and five days earlier had just married Helen Louise Soper, 1 June 1944 after obtaining a marriage license on 31 May 1944 and they were married in Alva, Oklahoma 1 June 1944 with Gene McGill (Bob's brother) as a witness. Bob & Helen's marriage was just another of those pre-war romances before the soldier got sent overseas to war. Uncle Bob and Aunt Helen were Divorced 22 June 1948.

Back to the 65th Anniversary of D-Day ... It was June 6, 1944, when as described at The National D-Day Memorial Foundation, "150,000 Allied soldiers clambered aboard heaving landing craft and braved six-foot swells, waves of machine gun fire, and more than 6 million mines to claim a stretch of sand at a place called Normandy. Their mission was to carve out an Allied foothold on the edge of Nazi-occupied Europe for the army of more than one million that would follow them in the summer of 1944. This army would burst forth from the beachhead, rolling across Europe into the heart of Germany, liberating millions, toppling a genocidal regime, and ending a nightmare along the way. But it all began on this beach in France, with an army of teenagers on a day called D-Day."

The youngest D-Day and WWII veterans turned 82 years of age today ... or this year. D-Day was a turning point in the course of WWII and signaled the beginning of the end of the age of fascism and the return of hope to millions in occupied nations globally.

Did any of your ancestors storm the beaches of Normandy, June 6, 1944?
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