The Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial. Courtesy of American Battlefield Monuments Commission.

No one has defined the meaning of D-Day any better than Pres. Ronald Reagan in his speech at the Pointe du Hoc.

Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender’s poem. You are men who in your "lives fought for life . . . and left the vivid air signed with your honor.”

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– President Ronald Reagan, June 6, 1984 speech at the Pointe du Hoc U.S. Army Ranger Monument                

June 6, 2009 will mark the sixty-fifth anniversary of D-Day, when the eyes of the world were focused on a fifty-mile stretch of beach along the Normandy coast. The men and women of that great generation are rapidly passing on at a rate estimated to be somewhere around 1,000 to 1,200 per day. In the not too distant future the day will come when all but a handful remain to remind us of their sacrifice.

That historic day was important for a great many reasons: militarily it signaled an important new phase of the war – a long-awaited return to the continent that been under Nazi domination and control since 1940 when Hitler’s jackbooted armies overran and occupied Western Europe. However for the occupied that had suffered grievously for over four years D-Day meant that liberation was at hand. It is hard for those of us who live in freedom here in the United States to imagine just what the news of the Allied landings really meant. We take our freedom pretty much for granted as a constitutional right. Too often we complain endlessly about the inconsequential and the trivial. It took 9/11 to awaken us to the fact that the world we live in more than a half-century after the most devastating conflict in the history of mankind is still a very dangerous place.

Another Memorial Day has come and gone and I wonder how many of us really understand that it is not just another three-day weekend and that we are once again engaging the men and women of our armed forces in deadly conflicts that, although far different from that of World War II, still places the United States in peril.

The people of the occupied nations of 1944 would have a difficult time I suspect in relating to our daily complaints. No one can really understand what freedom really means until it is taken away by those who would do us harm. As historian John Keegan has forcefully reminded us in his monumental history of that conflict: “The Second World War was the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world’s seven continents and all of its oceans. It killed fifty million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization.”

No one has defined the meaning of D-Day any better than Pres. Ronald Reagan in his speech at the Pointe du Hoc on occasion of the fortieth anniversary on June 6, 1984. “We’re here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty,” he said. “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.”

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D-Day was not just an American event. The men of Rudder’s Rangers, the Big Red One, the 4th and 29th Divisions and the thousands in supporting roles were all part of the greatest military force ever assembled for an amphibious invasion. Americans, British, Canadians, Free Polish, Free French, Dutch and Belgian soldiers, sailors and airmen made Normandy succeed in an unprecedented international venture.

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