Thursday, June 6, marks the 75-year anniversary of D-Day, the day of the greatest military invasion in modern history.
In what will probably be the last large commemoration to the Greatest Generation, the Daks Over Normandy event was conducted a day before on June 5, in which 250 men and women boarded vintage World War II aircraft and flew across the English Channel. Wearing World War II uniforms, the paratroopers jumped into the historic drop zones of Normandy. Among those paratroopers was 97-year-old D-Day veteran Tom Rice. Watch him jump from the plane HERE on the 75th anniversary.
Codenamed “Operation Overlord,” D-Day (June 6, 1944) began at 6:30 a.m. when an Allied force of 156,000 troops made up of primarily Americans, Britons and Canadians landed on five beaches stretching 50 miles along a heavily fortified coast in Normandy, France. French, Australian, Belgian, Czech, Dutch, Greek, New Zealand, Norwegian, Rhodesian and Polish soldiers also participated.
The sands of those five beaches, codenamed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword, would soon be red with blood as the German machine gunners, infantry and light artillery attempted to defend Adolf Hitler’s “Sea Wall.”
On most of the beaches, the Allied assault went pretty much as planned. However, at Omaha Beach, units of the American 1st Infantry Division faced stiff resistance from German infantry units dug in in the heights above them.
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