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This is perhaps the best thing I've seen written about it.
| quote: | Because of my own family history, I have always felt that D-Day was a great day to honor the spirit and tenacity of the people of Great Britain, as well as the courage and determination of the multinational invasion forces. The citizens of England, Scotland and Wales had endured over five years of hunger, hardship, and psychological and physical warfare leading up to D-Day. Their cities, towns, and factories were being bombed and rocketed on a daily basis, the men between the ages of 16 and 50 were fighting across the seas and around the world, and women, older folks, and boys and girls were pressed into service day and night to keep the allied war machine running and their island nation from a Nazi invasion.
Every citizen and every action was directed toward island defense and war production. Families were issued one egg per person per week, along with 4 ounces of meat and 4 ounces of margarine. All road signage on the island was removed, to confuse invaders, and transportation, when there was any at all, was shared. Mostly, people walked or rode bikes, and they did it at night in complete and total darkness. City-dwellers slept in subway tunnels and culverts at night to escape bombings. Children were sent by themselves into camps in the countryside for protection.
And in the midst of all the grinding hardship, a million Britons kept a secret. Since the summer of 1943, things had been happening on the island of Great Britain, from military encampments suddenly appearing in the Scottish north to huge and inexplicable movements of ships and soldiers all over southwest England. Canadians, Americans, and even their own men began appearing, without unit identification patches, all over the place. No one asked why, and no one ever told. Everyone knew, and yet, no one knew or talked about these activities. While the greatest air and naval armada in human history was being assembled and trained at sites across Britain, the citizens pretended they saw nothing, heard nothing, and they discussed nothing, even among themselves.
But they all knew. They knew that one day, as Winston Churchill put it, “The tide will turn.” So I can just imagine the moment that my mother, then a girl of twenty, can never forget and to this day, she cannot talk about without crying. On the night of June 5th, well after midnight, she and a girlfriend were walking home after working a second shift and catching a music show at a small theater. She had been a university student, but the university had closed, as all male students and professors were in the services and the women were assigned to work for the war department or homeland industries. As they walked, a wave of bombers and cargo planes swept overhead. This elicited no reaction from anybody on the street, as the RAF always launched at night. But then came another wave of heavy transports, which everyone who had been hearing planes for the past five years could tell from the engine sound. Then came another wave. And another. Then the higher, more reedy sound of night fighters. Then more transports. Then more bombers.
People came up out of their basements and culverts, and stood staring at the sky and at each other. Hundreds, and then thousands of people, still standing in complete black-out darkness, started cheering. They struck up the national anthem – ‘God save the King’ – and everyone hugged one another. Then, a thousand voices strong, they sang ‘Rule, Britannia!' As the planes still came overhead in waves, they all knew that, whatever happened, they did not have to pretend anymore – the invasion of Europe had begun. It was D-Day. |
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