D Day 65 years

Today is the 65th Anniversary of D-Day for many World War 2 Vets and their family's this may be the last major commemoration attended by actual veterans. As someone who had 3 Great Uncles who served (one who is still with us at 87) I felt some kind post was appropriate.


Two of the best articles of the last week.
The first recognizing the forgotten heroes of WW2 our Black Servicemen, most who experienced greater freedoms in the United Kingdom and France than they would as second class citizens of the nation they fought for. Yet they served,1 million of them as patriotic as the white class that showed them contempt on Omaha Beach.

The second article covers the very special bond between the Normandy French citizenry and their deep affection undimmed by the years for the American Liberators of France.

Read both Articles and Remember the sacrifice our Greatest Generation made for freedom and for their familys on this June 6 2009 65 years from D-Day.

Today in Normandy, twenty-seven war cemeteries hold the remains of over 110,000 dead from both sides: 77,866 German, 9386 American, 17,769 British, 5002 Canadian and 650 Poles.

This speaks to the ferocity of what came to be called The Battle of Normandy.

DeWayne


African-American D-Day veterans celebrate Barack Obama's trip to Normandy source Daily Telegraph

As America's first black president attends D-Day commemorations in Normandy, the Second World War's forgotten African-American soldiers say they enjoyed more freedom in Britain in the 1940s than in the segregated United States.

By Philip Sherwell in New York
Published: 9:00AM BST 06 Jun 2009

They have long been the forgotten heroes of D-Day, the African American military personnel who stormed ashore and risked their lives for a country that still treated them as second-class citizens.

Their faces were missing from the Hollywood films that heaped glory on US forces and and their stories were missing from the books, exhibitions and museums that commemorated the Normandy landings.

But with President Barack Obama, the country’s first African American commander-in-chief, in France for the 65th anniversary celebrations of D-Day on Saturday, black veterans of the segregated US army believe their role is finally being acknowledged.

“Where we were in The Longest Day or Saving Private Ryan?” asked Charles Sprowl, 87, referring to two of the best-known films about the events of June 6, 1944. “Where we were we in the history books?” The former corporal in the 490th Port Battalion, who dodged German bullets and rockets as he carried supplies ashore on Utah beach that day, believes that oversight is belatedly being put right.

“I think people are finally realising that there were African Americans there too and how important we were in the operation, but it’s been a long time, too long.”

For Mr Sprowl, who has lived his whole life in Dalston, Georgia, the biggest shock of his wartime service was not the carnage on the beaches of Normandy but his experience in the months before the invasion when he was stationed in Maghull, Merseyside.

“We would go in to Liverpool and we were treated like normal people,” he said. “There was no segregation and we could go where we wanted and do what we wanted. We went dancing in the Grafton Ballroom and shopping on Whitechapel like everyone else.

“My time in England was the first time I had really felt free in my life. And I wondered why another country was treating us better than our own country, better than the country we were fighting for.”

John Noble Roberts nearly paid the ultimate sacrifice 65 years ago. The oldest of 15 children from a poor cotton-growing family in Louisiana, he was a 19-year-old coastguardsman on an amphibious vessel that ferried troops across the Channel on D-Day.

After the second run, the craft became stranded on a sandbank at Omaha Beach as the tide went out and Mr Roberts, whose job was to run errands for the captain, was given a message to carry down to the engine room.

As he made his way across the deck, a German shell hit the marooned vessel, blowing off his right leg and badly injuring the left. “We were sitting ducks and the Germans clearly had us in their sights,” he recalled. “I thought that was it, I was going to die, but I guess it just wasn’t my time.”

The injuries ended Mr Roberts’ war. Back in the US, he received the Purple Heart that is awarded to all injured servicemen, but felt there was little recognition for the role played by African-Americans in Normandy.

“We were just second-class citizens again,” he said from Santa Maria, California, where he moved after the war. “You know, I really think that people didn’t know we were there.”

After the freedoms of his time in Britain, Mr Sprowl felt disheartened when he returned to Georgia, a Southern state where instititutional discrimination was maintained under the guise of the so-called “separate but equal” laws. “We went to war for our country and came home to segregation,” he said.

It took another two decades until the civil rights movement of the 1960s led by Martin Luther King Jr finally dislodged those iniquitious statutes.

Yet bias and ignorance remained. And the story of the black veterans in the Normandy landings went largely untold for more than six decades until a 2007 History Channel documentary entitled A Distant Shore: African Americans of D-Day.

“These men did not want to be portrayed as heroes, they just wanted the world to know they were there and they played their part,” said Doug Cohen, the writer and producer.

“The remarkable thing was that D-Day had been so well documented and yet this part of the story was missing. It was incredibly difficult even to find pictures of the African Americans there that day. The camera lenses were not focused on them so they had disappeared from history.”

In Normandy, Elise Mills, a French historian, pursued a similar mission after noting that she saw no pictures of black US personnel in D-Day memorials and museums.

She discovered thousands of photographs of African American servicemen in the US National Archives, including the all-black 320th Anti-Aircraft Battalion who put up a curtain of helium balloons above the beaches that exploded on impact with German planes. Some of those pictures now feature in exhibitions in France.

In A Distant Shore, one black veteran recalled being pelted with racial slurs by other soldiers on the beach and author Yvonne Latty shared the tale of a young African American medic who saved an estimated 300 lives under enemy fire - only to be denied a medal of honour by the US military, as was everyone of his skin colour. The army has since acknowledged systematic racial discrimination in the criteria used to award medals during the Second World War.

In all, about 2,000 African Americans took part in the landings on June 6, 1944, and about a million black personnel served in the US forces during the war. In recent years, their contribution has started to receive official acknowledgement - the Tuskegee airmen of America’s first black aviation combat unit were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by President George W Bush in 2007.

Mr Obama invited the airmen to his inauguration, saying their breakthroughs had paved his way to the White House. And on Memorial Day last week, he became the first president to send a wreath to the African American Civil War Memorial honouring the 200,000 black troops who fought for the North in that conflict.

The role of African American veterans is high in the president’s mind, aides say. Mr Obama’s speechwriters are still working on his words for Saturday, but the forgotten faces of D-Day could be in line for a belated tribute from the highest level.

65 years after D-day, Normandy's gratitude toward US has not faded

By Edward Cody Washington Post / June 6, 2009

CRICQUEVILLE-EN-BESSIN, France - Sixty-five years have gone by since D-day, but Louis Delevin remembers.

When he was elected mayor of this tiny Normandy village in 1989, Delevin's first gesture was to raise a monument to the US 354th Fighter Group, whose time in Cricqueville local farmers have never forgotten.

After the landing at nearby Utah Beach on June 6, 1944, Delevin recalled, young American pilots from the 354th used a grassy meadow here as an advanced landing strip for several months, until the German Army folded back and the front moved on.

One of the soldiers who passed through Cricqueville during that hot summer, according to information discovered recently by the Associated Press, was President Obama's grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who served with an Army aviation maintenance unit that helped keep the strip running.

"If they hadn't come, where would we be today?' said Delevin, 77, who as a farm boy of 12 provided the pilots with apple cider between raids on the retreating German troops. "You don't have to be a great scholar to understand that the freedom we enjoy today was decided in those days in 1944."

Up and down the Normandy coast, a rainy stretch of sand and rocks along the English Channel in northwestern France, the memory of what American troops did in that fateful June has remained tenaciously alive, enduring through the political disputes and personal exasperations that often divide leaders in Washington and Paris. Obama, who has scheduled a visit Saturday to the US military cemetery at nearby Colleville-sur-Mer, will find himself in unusually friendly territory here, a place where people like his grandfather are still honored and the image of America as a force for good has remained largely untarnished.

President Nicolas Sarkozy, who will accompany Obama to the cemetery, has gone out of his way since coming to power in 2007 to emphasize the tradition of official friendship between France and the United States. The irritation in Washington created by former president Jacques Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war has dissipated while, in France, things American are fashionable once again, particularly since Obama's election and President George W. Bush's departure from the White House.

Sarkozy prevailed on Obama to visit the Normandy landing beaches, ensuring that he would be televised by the new US president's side, affirming France's role - and his own - as a major player in the world. As it was with his predecessors, grasping at that role has been a major preoccupation for Sarkozy. In addition, the photogenic visit comes one day before European Parliament elections that are seen as a test of his popularity among French voters buffeted by the global economic crisis.

But it is in the little towns and villages of Normandy where the ties between France and the United States have remained most deeply rooted. In fact, here they never really faltered, and American presidents have showed up regularly to bask in them. President Ronald Reagan was here in 1984, and President Bill Clinton had his turn in 1994. Bush came in May 2002.

"When you are 4 or 5 years old, and your parents and your grandparents tell you about this, it sticks with you," said Benoit Noel, 42, who helps administer a museum commemorating what happened on Utah Beach. "Everybody in Normandy remembers the landing. We know what the Americans did for us. We haven't forgotten."

Here in Cricqueville, for instance, people gather at their little stone church once a year to celebrate Mass in honor of the young US soldiers who died on nearby beaches or in the surrounding fields. Inside, the US and French flags hang side by side over the tabernacle.

"Christian, do not forget the American soldiers who risked and sacrificed their lives for you along this coast on June 6, 1944," reads a marble plaque fixed to the wall of the nave. "The bell of this church guided them. You owe them to pray faithfully that God welcomes them."

Jean Castel, a former pilot from nearby Grandcamp who has spent years studying the Normandy landings, said the Cricqueville church bell played a genuine role; the little structure and its stone walls were on US military maps as a landmark for forces fighting their way inland after landing at Utah Beach.

Some of those battles have been commemorated at the Cricqueville City Hall, as well, with a series of photos and drawings depicting a celebrated assault by US Army Rangers up sheer cliffs at Pointe du Hoc. A photo of their commander, Colonel James Earl Rudder, looks out over the community meeting room under a sign reading, "Honor and Gratitude to the American Rangers."

In the dining room of Grandcamp's Hotel Duquesclin, a wall-size oil painting of the Point du Hoc attack has been hung to illustrate the moment for customers feasting on fish brought in from gray channel waters just out the window.

In the image, Rangers descending from landing craft rush toward the cliff walls with ladders and grappling hooks while German machine gun rounds send little fountains splashing up from the sea. Castel said that, in real life, many of the Rangers died before reaching the rocky shore.

Castel, 79, said he has been interested in the Normandy landings, and particularly the air attacks, since at the age of 14 he saw a US B-26 bomber crash near Rouen during a pre-landing raid. After becoming a pilot himself and a civilian employee of the US Air Force in the 1950s, he tracked down the pilot, identified as Dee Mitchell, who had survived the crash and returned home to Texas.

"People here never forget the Americans," Castel said. "For us, they were the liberators."