“The Final Salute” combines the best of the Memorial with the best of the D-Day story: a gathering of veterans and the general public at the nation’s memorial to the invasion of Normandy for reflection and remembrance – the story of ordinary people in extraordinary moments. The Memorial’s motto – “Commemorating Their Valor, Fidelity, and Sacrifice” – places education squarely at the center of its mission and “The Final Salute,” the 75th anniversary of D-Day, promises to be the Memorial’s biggest educational undertaking yet, and its largest event since the national dedication in 2001. Dedicated in 2001 with some 24,000 in attendance, the Memorial has since hosted hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the globe.
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That commitment, along with the distinction of sustaining the highest per capita D-Day losses, placed the monument to D-Day here rather than elsewhere in the country. Over time, grief gave rise to solemn pride and deep commitment to ensuring the story of D-Day and its costs and consequences were not lost on future generations.
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On JBedford, Virginia lost 20 of the 32 sons it sent to the invasion of Normandy, a devastating blow to the tiny community of just over 3,200 souls. Operation Kilroy: Passport to Virginia WWII Sites.D-Day Participant Identification Program.Employment Opportunities and Internships.Those men saved the world as we know it that day. Honor, gratitude, and respect are what we need to bring to the memory and the celebration of this day called D-Day on those beaches on the Normandy coast of France on June 6, 1944. Without their efforts that day, the dream of freedom might have been lost for a long time. They truly were the Greatest Generation of the 20th century. They were the very definition of heroism. They went into the jaws of hell scared yet aware of their duties. They were Americans and Canadians and Brits who came from the cities, towns, and villages of their countries, men from the ranks of the common citizens of their countries. We can never repay the courage, the determination, the dedication to duty, and the sacrifices for freedom that were undertaken by those young men that went ashore that day. It was the beginning of the end for the disturbed, inhumane, and inexpressibly destructive evil of Nazism and its attempt to bring much of the world under its control. It really was the turning point in the bloodiest of wars in human history. We must never forget the courage, the immense, almost incomprehensible sacrifices those men displayed and undertook on that momentous day. Sunday, June 6, 2021, was the 77th anniversary of the D-Day landings at Normandy. It is a revelation of the phrase, “War is Hell!” It is the sin of Cain killing his brother Abel, enacted on a global scale. It is backed by the music of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” and the words, in Latin, sung by an acapella chorus, “Lamb of God, You take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.” That is an evocation of the deeper reality of war: it is always the result, ultimately, of human brokenness. The beginning of this video is both visually and aurally powerful. They all knew, at some level, that this day had to be won in order to begin to defeat the existential threats to freedom that the Nazi ideology presented to the world. They simply knew that they had to get ashore, to fight like mad to get to the beaches and then go against the well-entrenched German forces and take what they presently held away from them. Most did not have the “big picture,” the end-game of the mission, in mind. Each stepped into the cold waters, heavy with packs filled with essentials and ammunition, each following the orders of the day, each believing he would, somehow, make it to shore and begin the fight. To have the courage to run into the face of that onslaught of bullets and shells is, by definition, uncommon valor. In real time, that individual would also have seen his brothers falling, struck down by a single bullet, never to make it ashore. We can imagine the sound of bullets buzzing past and the metallic clink of other bullets striking the hull of the landing craft. His fellow soldiers are already in the water, slogging toward the beach, and he knows that he must follow. It is the metaphorical view of a single soldier looking toward the beaches at Normandy from a landing craft. The opening scene of this video is very familiar to all of us.