Good Morning Kids. On this the 80th anniversary of Operation Overlord, D-Day, the allied invasion of Nazi -occupied Europe which began the Anglo-American effort to liberate Europe from the Nazis. I am reminded of the words of the Czech author Milan Kundera who wrote:
As the child of a mother who somehow miraculously, along with her entire family miraculous to the power of miraculous all survived intact the evil that wiped out the majority of Europe's Jews and millions of others, as well as being the namesake of a man who gave his life in the green hell of Saipan 80 years ago this July. D-Day, Midway, Anzio and dozens of other names and places are a part of my DNA.
Ronald Reagan famously said, and as we are living and witnessing this very day predicted:
<center“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.” </center
Excerpted from President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 speech on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, delivered at the site of crucial combat before some of the surviving veterans who fought in it.
We’re here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty.
For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow.
Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation.
Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue.
Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.
We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France.
The air is soft, but 40 years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon.
At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944, 225 Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs.
Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion: to climb these sheer and desolate cliffs and take out the enemy guns.
The Allies had been told that some of the mightiest of these guns were here and they would be trained on the beaches to stop the Allied advance.
The Rangers looked up and saw the enemy soldiers — the edge of the cliffs shooting down at them with machine guns and throwing grenades.
And the American Rangers began to climb.
They shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up.
When one Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed, shot back, and held their footing.
Soon, one by one, the Rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe.
. . . The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next.
It was the deep knowledge — and pray God we have not lost it — that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest.
You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause.
And you were right not to doubt.
You all knew that some things are worth dying for.. .
. . . Let us show them by our actions that we understand what they died for. . . .
Strengthened by their courage, heartened by their valor, and borne by their memory, let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died.
Thank you very much, and God bless you all.
When you see what's going on on campuses and sadly down to the kindergarten level in schools all over this nation, in the battle of memory against forgetting the situation is in grave doubt.
NOTE: The opinions expressed in the links may or may not reflect my own. I include them because of their relevance to the discussion of a particular issue.
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