Some days change the world. Yesterday was the 74^th anniversary of the Normandy Invasion during WWII – commonly referred to as D-Day. It was called Operation Overlord by the Allied commanders who developed its strategy. To defeat the enemy, they surmised that they needed a way to overwhelm the German forces and push them back, out of France, before invading Germany. D-Day was the first step in the plan to end WWII. The problem was, the Germans knew the Allies would be coming. So they fortified the French coastline with concrete bunkers, big guns, and machine gun nests. D-Day was a very risky first step. Against these odds, the landing at Normandy succeeded, but at the loss of 2,500 Allied troops killed in securing the beach.

It was well planned. For some time, the French underground freedom fighters had slipped bits of information about the Normandy fortifications to the Allied commanders. Frogmen had swam undetected along the surf to map out the location of floating mines and iron snares meant to keep any landing craft from getting to the beaches. Coded messages and surveillance of the area gave the Allies a good idea of what they were facing. Yet, not everything went as planned. In fact, very little went as scripted at first. The first waves of troops on Omaha Beach faced heavy machine gunfire. There were many casualties as men tried to get to the shoreline. Those who were not shot were pinned down on the beach, unable to move forward. What was supposed to be a landing and quick troop movements to meet the next objective bogged down. What was supposed to take minutes lasted for hours. The success of the mission meant that some 150,000 troops needed to come ashore to overpower the German defenses. Most of these were stuck waiting in boats offshore.

Yet these brave soldiers regrouped and mounted an attack on the machine gun nests. They surrounded them and attacked them from the rear. One by one, they took out the German bunkers and made it possible for the rest of the landing to take place.

The day after the invasion – commonly referred to as D Plus One, war correspondent Ernie Pyle landed at Normandy and surveyed the carnage on the beaches. In his article about the invasion, entitled A Long Thin Line of Personal Anguish, he describes the way the sands of the beach shifted often to cover and uncover the "corpses of heroes.”

As I plowed out over the wet sand of the beach on that first day ashore, I walked around what seemed to be a couple of pieces of driftwood sticking out of the sand. But they weren’t driftwood.

They were a soldier’s two feet. He was completely covered by the shifting sands except for his feet. The toes of his GI shoes pointed toward the land he had come so far to see, and which he saw so briefly.¹

The anniversary of D-Day is always a reminder to me of the cost of freedom. It is positioned at a crossroads between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July – one day to honor those who have sacrificed their lives in defense of our country and the other to commemorate the founding of the United States and the liberty we all enjoy. D-Day was a day when that freedom was laid on the line. Take the beaches of Normandy and you can free the world of tyranny. Lose the battle of Normandy and freedom is a distant dream for millions of people. Those who led our country and committed those troops to battle thought it was a risk worth pursuing. General Dwight D. Eisenhower said it well in his speech to the Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Forces on the morning of the invasion:

The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.²

It makes me wonder what we would risk to preserve freedom these days. Is there still a belief that liberty matters, or, are we too preoccupied with our personal agendas on ordinary days to care about the days that change the course of the world. There was a day 74 years ago when it was decided that freedom was worth risking the lives of 150,000 men to preserve it. I am sitting at the crossroads today and wondering if it still matters. Not to be too fatalistic about the times in which we live, but I do wonder if there would be the resolve today to regroup, take an order to charge through a hail of bullets - against all odds - and take a beach away from those who were bent on doing harm if freedom was on the line. Or has liberty eroded into nothing more than a social media post in our time? If freedom were on the line, would we just tweet our particular viewpoint back and forth and call it our D-Day?

Some days change the world. I pray that we can still understand the importance of brave young men who were called upon to lay their own interests aside and charge a beach to secure the world’s freedom.

1. A Long Thin Line of Personal Anguish, Ernie Pyle, June 17, 1944, IU School of Journalism

2. Order of the Day delivered June 6, 1944, Dwight D. Eisenhower, National Archives

Photo courtesy of Army Signal Corps Collection in the U.S. National Archives. This photo shows U.S. troops approaching Omaha Beach where some of the fiercest fighting on D-Day took place.