I was thinking this morning that posting another message about wartime loss and sacrifice might be regarded as redundant coming this soon after Memorial Day. Then again, this day, June 6, is special in its own right, just like December 7 and the memory of the Japanese attack on the U. S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii that plunged the United States headlong into World War Two. On that Sunday morning in 1941, we found ourselves at war with Japan in the Pacific, and twenty-four hours later, Japan’s German ally, Adolf Hitler, declared war on the United States. We would now come face to face with Nazi aggression in Europe, an entanglement we, as a neutral country, had avoided since the war in Europe began in 1939.

Less than three years later, the Allied forces brought their combined strength to Europe to repel the German invaders, whose occupation of most of the countries on the continent had been destructive and brutal. Hitler had declared to the ungrateful people of those occupied countries that they should welcome his establishment of a Fortress Europe on the ludicrous rationale that he was saving Europe from Communism, immorality (read: homosexuality), and the evils that stemmed from the activities of “treasonous” (read: anti-Nazi) intellectuals. But the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi invasions of neighboring countries were about to be brought to an end.

It was 78 years ago today, June 6, 1944 when the Allied forces undertook that fateful mission. D-Day. Code-named Operation Overlord, that dreadful day saw thousands of casualties as American, British, and Canadian troops stormed from their landing craft onto their assigned beaches. It was a grim, bloody encounter, and the American troops who came ashore on Omaha and Utah Beaches took the brunt of the German resistance. The GIs were coming in from the sea, there was nowhere else to go but forward. They ran into the face of withering direct machine gun fire from a solidly entrenched enemy. But they took the beaches, and they took extremely heavy casualties. Airborne and glider units had been dropped off target and were scattered into German Wehrmacht-infested areas, but the fragmented units linked up where they could and proceeded to their missions. The liberation of Europe had begun. It ended on May 8, 1945, V-E Day, after almost a year of heavy fighting.

I think it is still important to remember D-Day and its significance for the shape of post-World War Two Europe, and indeed the world. Out of that alliance of the western nations of the Atlantic came the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO. It is still relevant today as we observe the unfolding of Russian aggression in Ukraine, and the combined response of NATO to meet that challenge. Putin will learn Hitler’s lesson.

Finally, I would like to remember the service of my uncle, Private George A. Marrash, 23^rd Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division. George was severely wounded during the Normandy invasion and was evacuated to England where he died of his wounds a few weeks later on July 17, 1944. He along with so many of his fellow soldiers died for the moral and civic values we and other true democracies hold dear. Let’s not permit ourselves to lose those values to lies, demagoguery, and the fanaticism of extremists. That’s what the citizen-soldiers of the greatest generation went out on D-Day to defeat.