6 June 1944 D-Day

Tired, wet, miserable, 3000+ miles from home. Could you have had the courage to disembark and do your job in the face of machine gun fire and entrenched sharpshooters? Men falling everywhere always wondering if maybe the next one was going to be you. Blood and body parts everywhere, dead men washing in and with the waves. Think about who you are today could you have done this? Could you have been there on those beaches and fought to survive and liberate Europe from the NAZI stranglehold? Regular guys like you and me did, they fought and died that day; acts of courage and valor too many of us will never know and luckily will never have to know. Damn this country produces such great people too many we will never know the names of. Thank you to all of those that fought that hellish morning in the first wave. We will never forget what those soldiers who died there did for mankind. Thank a vet.

It is the VETERAN, not the preacher,
who has given us freedom of religion.

It is the VETERAN, not the reporter,
who has given us freedom of the press.

It is the VETERAN, not the poet,
who has given us freedom of speech.

It is the VETERAN, not the campus organizer,
who has given us freedom to assemble.

It is the VETERAN, not the lawyer,
who has given us the right to a fair trial.

It is the VETERAN, not the politician,
Who has given us the right to vote.
- Anonymous


Casualty estimates for Allied forces vary, but range from 2,500 to more than 5,000 dead on D-Day. Adding to the confusion is that D-Day books and histories often count wounded, missing and troops taken prisoner.

On its Web site, the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth, England, says an estimated 2,500 Allied troops died. The U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C., numbers 6,036 American casualties, including wounded and missing. The Heritage Foundation in Washington estimates 4,900 dead.

"It's very difficult to get accurate figures. People get buried. Bodies disintegrate. Evidence of the deaths disappeared. People drowned," said John Keegan, author of "Six Armies in Normandy: From D-Day to the Liberation of Paris."

He estimates 2,500 Americans and 3,000 other Allied troops died on D-Day.

More than 19,000 civilians in Normandy also died in Allied bombing before and after D-Day to soften up German defenses. And Allied air forces lost nearly 12,000 men in April and May 1944 in operations ahead of the invasion, the D-Day Museum says.

Even as the ranks of veterans who survived the assault and the push into Germany thin with time, work on tallying the dead continues.

Carol Tuckwiller, director of research at the National D-Day Memorial Foundation in Bedford, Va., has spent four years combing through government, military and cemetery records for names of Allied dead on D-Day. She hopes to have a figure by next year.

"We feel like we're probably going to end up with a total of about 4,500 fatalities for both the Americans and Allied countries. Right now, we have about 4,200 names confirmed," she said. "Of course we realize we may never be 100 percent complete."