Salute Their Valor

June 6, 1944, a date that should be commemorated as the beginning of the end of Hitlerism as the first step in the liberation of France started the freeing of Western Europe, does not receive anywhere near the attention it should. Sword, Gold, Juno, Utah, and Omaha beaches (the latter two stormed by American forces) should be as familiar to American school children as Gettysburg, but sadly they are not. Young allied soldiers, sailors, airmen, and coast guardsmen spent their lives that fateful day on a mission whose success was anything but certain. And the stakes could not have been higher, preliminary exercises to test how an invasion might go- the Raid on Dieppe, the bloody blunder at St. Nazaire, and even a landing at Slapton Sands, chosen for its terrain similar to Normandy, were all abject failures with more than seven hundred allied lives lost in the Slapton dress rehearsal for invasion when German fast boats happened on the maneuvers and sped to the attack. D-Day happened at tremendous cost but yielded incalculable gain as it signaled definitively that Nazism was being forced back. The courage manifested that day by free men proved decisive in ending the scourge that had enslaved Europe.