Sixty-five years ago today, June 5, close to 350,000 Allied troops were massed in the south of England, poised to launch the largest land and sea invasion in world history. The target? Nazi-occupied Europe. The ultimate goal? The utter destruction of Adolf Hitler’s murderous regime.
On June 6 — D-Day — more than 150,000 soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy, backed up by close to 200,000 personnel on warships pounding the German defenders. Wave after wave of landing crafts pushed toward Omaha, Utah, Sword, Gold and Juno beaches.
The return fire was so withering, some troops were killed before they could even hit the water; others died the minute they set foot on the beach. Survivors have said the water churned blood-red that day and the sand was mud, not from water, but from the blood of dead and dying troops.
Scholars and researchers with the National D-Day Memorial Foundation in Bedford, after years of painstaking research, have compiled the most accurate listing of the number of Allied soldiers who died that day: 2,499 American troops and 1,915 other Allied soldiers for a total of 4,414 in just 24 hours.
In the late 1990s, D-Day veteran Bob Slaughter took it upon himself to raise some sort of memorial in his hometown of Roanoke to honor the local D-Day vets. In short order, the idea morphed into a grand-scale commemoration of all D-Day veterans that would be erected in Bedford, the community that had the highest per-capita death rate of local soldiers on that fateful day.
Within months after its June 6, 2001, dedication, the federal government was investigating the fundraising tactics of the foundation’s then-director, Robert Burrows; after two mistrials, prosecutors dropped all charges. The foundation, millions of dollars in debt due to a rushed construction schedule, went into bankruptcy reorganization soon thereafter.
Still, the memorial has drawn hundreds of thousands of tourists, many of them World War II and D-Day veterans. Yet today, the nonprofit foundation that operates the site is in very real danger of closing in the not-too-distant future. A drop in donations and the recession have hit the foundation hard.
This week, U.S. Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Tom Perriello, D-Fifth District, introduced legislation in Congress for the National Park Service to assume control of the site.
We wish them luck. This memorial belongs not just to all free people ... everywhere.
It’s a reminder that the freedoms we enjoy today come at a high cost.
A very high cost.
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