The 75th Anniversary

When I was walking through the USN Memorial last year at noon on December 6th, the Navy band and honor guard were practicing, and I heard one passerby ask her companion what the servicemen were commemorating (practicing for, the next day), and her friend replied, "Oh, the observance of D-Day, which I think is tomorrow."  Of course, this is the typical shocking ignorance on the part of many Americans of our own hallowed history, but at least the commentator had one factoid correct in that she identified the correct war involved, World War II.

Of course, the commemoration the next day was to solemnly remember the dastardly Pearl Harbor attack by Japan on December 7, 1941, which propelled the US overnight into the already raging global conflagration.  Inexplicably, Nazi Germany, which already had its hands full trying to subjugate the vast expanse of Soviet Russia with its untold millions of people, and which was concurrently battling the world's greatest then-existing empire as well in Great Britain, declared war on the US a few days later and the rest is history.

D-Day followed two and a half years later, when American, British and Canadian troops stormed Fortress Europa by coming ashore on five Normandy beaches in France on June 6, 1944, the greatest military operation in history, and within a year the Nazi scourge was totally obliterated and the Japanese East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a fancy name for a brutal colonialist exploitation scheme, was consigned to history's scrapheap a few months later as well.  This summer is the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, an event that will be celebrated in France and the world over.

My first and foremost running buddy, Rhea, who last decade moved to the left coast with her husband Eric, is a military buff and they contacted me recently about their plans to tour Normandy later this spring and to specifically hire a guide for a close-in and personal inspection of the two American D-Day beaches, Utah and the infamous Omaha beach.  Although they know I have never been outside of North America, they invited me to come along.