Vets mark D-Day in Normandy

Invasion’s 70th anniversary draws world leaders to battle site

British World War II veteran Frederick Glover watches Thursday as soldiers parachute down during a D-Day commemoration event in Ranville, western France, on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the World War II Allied landings in Normandy.
British World War II veteran Frederick Glover watches Thursday as soldiers parachute down during a D-Day commemoration event in Ranville, western France, on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the World War II Allied landings in Normandy.

COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France -- Ceremonies to commemorate the 70th anniversary of D-Day have drawn thousands of visitors to the cemeteries, beaches and stone-walled villages of Normandy this week, including some of the few remaining survivors of the largest sea-borne invasion ever mounted.

On June 6, 1944, almost 160,000 Allied troops crossed from England to storm five beaches in northern France, in an invasion that turned the fortunes of war against Nazi Germany.

World leaders and dignitaries including President Barack Obama and Queen Elizabeth II are to gather today to honor the veterans who risked and gave their lives.

For many visitors, the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, with its 9,387 white marble tombstones on a bluff overlooking the site of the battle's bloodiest fighting at Omaha Beach, is the emotional centerpiece of pilgrimages to honor the tens of thousands of men killed on D-Day and the months of fighting afterward.

D-Day veteran Clair Martin, 93, said he has gone to Omaha Beach three times in the past 70 years -- "four if you count the time they were shooting at me."

The San Diego resident landed on D-Day with the 29th Infantry Division and said he kept fighting until he reached the Elbe River in Germany the next April. "I praise God I made it and that we've never had another world war," he said.

On May 22, the U.S. Senate unanimously approved a resolution sponsored by Sen. John Boozman commemorating the 70th Anniversary of D-Day. The French Parliament had passed a similar resolution in May and asked the U.S. House and Senate to do the same.

"As time passes, it remains our duty to remember the sacrifices made by the members of the Greatest Generation, including those brave Arkansans, who answered the call of those being oppressed by the Nazi and Fascist regimes," Boozman said in a statement. He is recovering from heart surgery and was not able to vote on the measure.

Ceremonies large and small are taking place across Normandy, ahead of an international summit today in Ouistreham, a small port that was the site of a strategic battle on D-Day. Fireworks lit up the sky Thursday night to mark the anniversary.

Among British veterans of the landings, some 650 planned to retrace their route aboard a British warship to attend a ceremony at the easternmost of the five beaches, which was code-named Sword. The others, from west to east, were known in military planning as Utah, Omaha, Gold and Juno. U.S. troops landed at Utah and Omaha.

"It was a killing field," said Harry Billinge, an 88-year-old British veteran. "I hope they will not forget the poor devils that died here."

French President Francois Hollande's decision to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to participate in the official ceremony despite his exclusion from the G-7 summit in Brussels is being seen by some as justified recognition of the Soviet Union's great sacrifice in defeating Adolf Hitler, but by others as a distraction given the West's dispute with Russia over Ukraine.

Russian paratroopers joined the commemorations late Thursday, jumping down onto the town of Arromanches waving a Russian flag, in a reminder of their role in fighting the Nazis on the eastern front and the millions of lives the Soviet Union lost.

With many D-Day veterans now in their 90s, this year's anniversary is expected to be the last time many of those who took part in the battle will be able to make the long journey back to Normandy and tell their stories.

"Three minutes after landing a mortar blew up next to me and I lost my K-rations," said Curtis Outen, 92, of Pageland, S.C. Outen, making his first return to Normandy since the war, related the loss of his military-issued meal packet as though it happened yesterday. "Then, I cut my arm in the barbed wire entanglements. After that, I was all right."

By midmorning hundreds of visitors walked among the cemetery's long rows of white crosses and stars of David, pausing to read the brief inscriptions that give hints of the lives laid to rest there.

One young woman stood quietly in soft rain, hand over her heart, and tearfully placed a red rose at a tombstone which read "Here Rests in Honored Glory a Comrade in Arms Known But to God."

"I just wanted to pay tribute,"said Marissa Neitling, 30, of Lake Oswego, Ore.

Information for this article was contributed by Greg Keller of The Associated Press; by Sarah D. Wire of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette; and by Alan Cowell of The New York Times.

A Section on 06/06/2014

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