Remembering the Significance of D-Day

Remembering the Significance of D-Day

At 0227 hours on the morning of June 6, 1944, Lieutenant Robert Mathias saw the red light flash above the door of his C47 “Dakota” aircraft, signaling his men to get ready to parachute into a terrifying blackness that was streaked with machine-gun tracers and punctuated by exploding rounds from four-barrel 20-millimeter Flakvierling-38 anti-aircraft guns. The Cotentin Peninsula loomed beneath him as he stared into an abyss crackling with enemy fire and crawling with Nazi troops. Machine-gun rounds peppered their slow-moving, easily targetable transport, “sounding like rocks being shaken in a tin can,” Stephen Ambrose reports. Then, just as he was...