On the morning of June 6, 1944, 156,000 Allied soldiers crossed the English Channel and stormed the beaches of Normandy. Many of them were teenagers. Most had never seen combat. They climbed out of landing craft into chest-deep water, under machine gun fire, and ran toward fortified positions that military planners knew would kill a significant percentage of them before they reached the sand.
The scale of the operation defied belief. Five thousand ships. Eleven thousand aircraft. Paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines in the dark. Rangers scaled hundred-foot cliffs under fire. On Omaha Beach, the first wave was nearly annihilated — men died in the water, on the sand, on the seawall. The ones behind them kept coming. By nightfall, the Allies had a foothold. Within a year, they had liberated France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and pushed into Germany itself.
The soldiers who landed at Normandy came from the United States, Britain, Canada, Free France, Poland, Norway, Australia, and a dozen other nations. They were fighting to liberate countries most of them had never visited, for people most of them had never met. The Americans alone suffered over 29,000 casualties in Normandy. The cemeteries are still there — rows of white crosses and Stars of David on bluffs overlooking the beaches, in soil that a foreign country gave to the nation that bled for it.
They were asked to save a continent. They were nineteen years old. They went.
"Perhaps the reason the Universe gave you a broken world is so that you could have a chance to fix it."