Today is the 76th anniversary of the Normandy invasion. Over 150,000 Allied forces took part in the invasion. Over a million men were part of the overall battle of Normandy. Thousands of ships and planes. Even trying to fathom the size of the operation is impossible to comprehend.
It remains the largest seaborne invasion in history. The strategic significance of the Normandy invasion was that it gave the Allied forces an entry point into continental Europe.
A lot of our mental images of what D-Day would have been like come from the opening sequence of the movie Saving Private Ryan. D-Day hero and Medal of Honor recipient Walter Ehlers used to tell people to multiply that scene by 60 to appreciate what it was actually like.
(more…)
