D-DAY: Generations

Sixty-five years ago today the greatest armada ever filled the English Channel as ships and boats of all description carried the troops that would hit the beaches of Normandy. That day and for many days to come, uncommon courage became a common virtue. The dead buried in northern France inhabit sacred soil and live forever in the memories not only of their families and countrymen but of all those who love liberty.

The "greatest generation" is imprecise. Numerous generations fought the war. Teens lied about their age for a chance to serve. Young men dropped out of college to enlist. Patriots in their 30s left careers to take up arms. Veterans of World War I returned to fight in World War II. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. splashed ashore at Normandy with the first wave. He earned the Medal of Honor, which was awarded after a heart attack took his life several weeks after the invasion. He was 57, and sang hymns as his landing craft delivered him to armageddon.

D-Day was no sure thing. If the German army had repulsed the landings, if the Allies had not secured beachheads and broken through the front lines, then the war would have lasted far longer, at an increasingly terrible cost. And despite D-Day's success, considerable struggle and heartbreak lay ahead. Anne Frank and her family listened to radio broadcasts and charted progress on maps as the armies of hope advanced toward an attic in Amsterdam. For a beautiful girl, liberation did not come in time. A diary ended too soon.

Others shed tears of happiness, as crowds hugged GIs, covered in mud and splattered with blood, whose presence meant the nightmare was over and the dream had dawned. The children of the New World battled in the realms of Caesar and Charlemagne, Napoleon and Wellington, thereby helping to save Europe from itself. Their hour will remain one of history's finest, even unto the end of the world.