6 June 1944

“So much of the progress that would define the 20th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, came down to the battle for a slice of beach only six miles long and two miles wide.”
–President Barak Obama in Normandy to mark the 65th anniversary of D-Day

“They’re murdering us here. Let’s move inland and get murdered.”
–Colonel Charles D. Canham, 116th Infantry Regiment commander, on Omaha Beach

At the core, the American citizen soldiers knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn’t want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed. So they fought, and won, and we, all of us, living and yet to be born, must be forever profoundly grateful.”
–Author Stephen Ambrose

“It was a different world then. It was a world that required young men like myself to be prepared to die for a civilization that was worth living in.”
–Harry Read, British D-Day veteran

George S Patton’s speech to the Third Army, given ahead of the Allied invasion:

“War is a bloody, killing business. You’ve got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours. Rip them up the belly. Shoot them in the guts. When shells are hitting all around you, and you wipe the dirt off your face and realise that instead of dirt it’s the blood and guts of what once was your best friend beside you, you’ll know what to do! I don’t want to get any messages saying, ‘I am holding my position.’ We are not holding a goddamned thing. Let the Germans do that. We are advancing constantly, and we are not interested in holding onto anything except the enemy’s balls. We are going to twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all of the time.”

Ernie Pyle, D-Day column, excerpts from Ernie’s War: The Best of Ernie Pyle’s World War II Dispatches:

“All that remained on the beach was some sniping and artillery fire, and the occasional startling blast of a mine geysering brown sand into the air… That plus the bodies of soldiers lying in rows covered with blankets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in a line as though on drill. And other bodies, uncollected, still sprawling grotesquely in the sand or half hidden by the high grass beyond the beach. That plus an intense, grim determination of work-weary men to get this chaotic beach organised and get all the vital supplies and the reinforcements moving more rapidly over it from the stacked-up ships standing in droves out to sea. Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all.”

American historian Stephen E. Ambrose, in his book Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest:

“Lieutenant Welsh remembered walking around among the sleeping men, and thinking to himself that ‘they had looked at and smelled death all around them all day but never even dreamed of applying the term to themselves. They hadn’t come here to fear. They hadn’t come to die. They had come to win.”

“I’m very disappointed, and I hate leaving the world feeling this way.”
–Private Jack Port, now 97, on the state of the world currently

Photographs from Omaha and Utah below: