Day of days

 Eighty years ago today.

Eighty years ago today, Hitler's mad experiment in human extermination began its inevitable fall.

Eighty years ago today, his Fortress Europe proved no match for a bunch of kids who assaulted it headfirst with nothing but their flesh and blood and stubborn will for armor.

Eighty years ago today, the words Omaha and Utah and Juno and Gold and Sword were inscribed in red on the pages of history, and became something more than just words. Eighty years ago today, they were the code names for a handful of beaches in Normandy transformed into death traps by Hitler's Nazis, and then into peaceful strands where people go now to stare out at the English Channel and struggle to summon the violence and sacrifice of D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Eighty years ago today.

For context, we're now as far away from then as the kids who walked into the Nazi storm that day were from Grant and Lee squaring off in the swelter of a Virginia summer in the last campaign of the American Civil War.

That happened in 1864, or 80 years before D-Day.

It's now 2024, and again I summon the words of Rick Atkinson, who described D-Day thusly in volume three of his epic Libertation Trilogy, "The Guns at Last Light":

For those who outlived the day, who survived this high thing, this bright honor, this destiny, the memories would remain as shot-torn as the beach itself ... They remembered the red splash of shells plumping the shallows, and machine-gun bullets puckering the sea "like wind-driven hail" ... Mortar fragments said to be the size of shovel blades skimmed the shore, trimming away arms, legs, heads. Steel-jacketed rounds kicked up sand "like wicked living things," as a reporter wrote, or swarmed overhead in what the novelist-soldier Vernon Scannell called an "insectile whine" ...

Eighty years ago today.