![]() ![]() ![]() “He had 3 million troops under his command, and what they all devoured in just one day was stupendous,” says Rives. “They had massive ammo dumps, and supply dumps, and in one of those supply dumps they had piled up 3,500 tons of bath soap-which Eisenhower later sent into France so the soldiers could take baths. “I had some fun here one day looking up statistics, of all the stuff the Allies piled up on the beaches of southern England to support the invasion,” says Rives. The Lasting Impact of War An Effort of Staggering Scale And there was no longer any mystery: “You now know what it is like to be fired upon,” he said, “as well as to fire.” In a gunfight with German soldiers, where bullets flew so thick that no one dared raise their heads to look up, he removed “the mystery” he’d pondered for months-about whether fear in combat would compel him to run or to fight. But hours later, “some mysteries in life were removed,” Hoffman said. And I’m flat on my back, and…I got to roll, and I can’t get to my weapon and now… I can’t find my knife! And the footsteps have stopped…and (suddenly) I am looking up into the eyes of a big, brown cow.” “Five minutes on the ground and I’m about to get it. On D-Day he parachuted with a hard thud into a Normandy cow pasture only minutes after midnight-and he heard footsteps approaching fast, even before he could unhook himself from his parachute straps. Raymond Hoffman, from Lowell, Massachusetts, gave an oral history interview in 1978 at the Eisenhower Library about the life-and-death fear he survived as a 22-year-old paratrooper in the U.S. The “D” in D-Day means simply “Day,” as in “The day we invade.” (The military had to call it something.) But to those who survived June 6, and the subsequent summer-long incursion, D-Day meant sheer terror. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.”ĬOMMEMORATE THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY OF D-DAY WITH HISTORY TRAVEL™. A few months after D-Day, General Eisenhower visited a German death camp, and wrote: “We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. “You could make the argument that they saved the world. “It’s hard to imagine what the consequences would have been had the Allies lost,” says Timothy Rives, deputy director of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas. With gas chambers and firing squads they killed 6 million Jewish people and millions more Poles, Russians, gays, disabled people and others undesirable to the Nazi regime, which sought to engineer a master Germanic race. They set up murderous police states everywhere they went, then hunted down and imprisoned millions. German armies during World War II overran most of Europe and North Africa and much of the western Soviet Union. Here’s why D-Day remains an event of great magnitude, and why we owe those fighters so much: Halting the Nazi Genocidal Machine ![]()
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