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D-Day, 75 years ago

“As one officer said,” war correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote shortly after the invasion, “the only way to take a beach is to face it and keep going. It is costly at first but it’s the only way.” On June 6, 1944, Allied forces launched a massive invasion of the French coast at Normandy, opening a new front that helped defeat Nazi Germany and end the war in Europe within a year. “In the light of a couple of days of retrospection,” Pyle wrote from the front, “we sit and talk and call it a miracle that our men ever got on at all or were able to stay on.”