6/2/19
'I'd like to volunteer, sir': 75 years after D-Day, memories live on through oral histories
Breaking Newstags: military history, D-Day, Normandy, World War 2
Just before parachuting into Nazi-occupied Europe, Fayette Richardson asked himself an existential question: "My God, Most Powerful, what am I doing here?"
The thought had to be on the minds of myriad soldiers on June 6, 1944. It was D-Day, the launch of a long-awaited campaign by the U.S. and British armies to free the nations of Western Europe that Hitler had conquered.
Mounted from airfields and ports in Great Britain, it was the largest amphibious assault in history. More than 155,000 Allied troops landed at Normandy, France, that day.
Code-named Operation Overlord, it dramatically changed the course of World War II. Seventy-five years later, the ranks have thinned of those who braved machine gun fire on French beaches that were marked on their maps with American names like Utah and Omaha.
Richardson died in 2010. But fortunately for us and for future generations, he and other veterans kept diaries, wrote memoirs or recorded their recollections. Oral history was in its infancy when Stephen Ambrose began tape recording D-Day veterans, observed Toni Kiser, assistant director for collections management at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans.
"Ambrose, who began collecting the oral histories housed in our archives, was a distinguished historian," Kiser said.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Canada's Hottest Tourist Attraction Could be the Government's Doomsday Bunker
- How Private Equity Cashed in on Medical Abortion
- Who Gets to Sing About Revenge in Pop Music?
- Dem Governors Pritzker and Newsom Challenge AP on Caving to DeSantis
- Remembering Victor Navasky: Editor was a "Ringmaster" at "The Nation"
- Erika Lee and Carol Anderson on Myths and Realities of Race in American History
- Banished Podcast: Sunshine State's Descent Into Darkness
- Caroline Dodds Pennock on The Indigenous Americans Who Visited Europe
- Why Can't the Democrats Build a Governing Majority? (Review of Timothy Shenk)
- Victimhood and Vengeance: The Reactionary Roots of Christian Nationalism