Remarks on the 60th anniversary of D-Day in Colleville-sur-Mer, France

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, June 14, 2004

June 6, 2004

Mr. President and Mrs. Chirac; Secretary Powell and Secretary Principi; General Myers; Members of the United States Congress; my fellow Americans; and ladies and gentlemen: It is a high honor to represent the American people here at Normandy on the 6th of June, 2004.

Twenty summers ago, another American President came here to Normandy to pay tribute to the men of D-day. He was a courageous man himself and a gallant leader in the cause of freedom. And today we honor the memory of Ronald Reagan.

Mr. President, thank you for your gracious welcome to the reunion of Allies. History reminds us that France was America's first friend in the world. With us today are Americans who first saw this place at a distance, in the half-light of a Tuesday morning long ago. Time and providence have brought them back to see once more the beaches and the cliffs, the crosses and the Stars of David.

Generations to come will know what happened here, but these men heard the guns. Visitors will always pay respects at this cemetery, but these veterans come looking for a name and remembering faces and voices from a lifetime ago. Today we honor all the veterans of Normandy and all their comrades who never left.

On this day in 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the American people, not with a speech but with a prayer. He prayed that God would bless America's sons and "'Lead them straight and true." He continued, "They will need Thy blessings. They will be sore tired, by night and by day, without rest--until victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war."

As Americans prayed along, more than 12,000 Allied aircraft and about 5,000 naval vessels were carrying out General Eisenhower's order of the day. In this massive undertaking, there was a plan for everything, except for failure. Eisenhower said, "This operation is planned as a victory, and that's the way it is going to be."

They had waited for one break in the weather, and then it came. Men were sent in by parachute and by glider. And on this side of the Channel, through binoculars and gunsights, German soldiers could see coming their way the greatest armada anyone had ever seen. In the lead were hundreds of landing craft carrying brave and frightened men.

Only the ones who made that crossing can know what it was like. They tell of the pitching deck, the whistles of shells from the battleships behind them, the white jets of water from enemy fire around them, and then the sound of bullets hitting the steel ramp that was about to fall. One GI later said, "'As our boat touched sand and the ramp went down, I became a visitor to hell."

Hitler's Atlantic Wall was composed of mines and tank obstacles, trenches and jutting cliffs, gun emplacements and pillboxes, barbed wire, machinegun nests, and artillery trained accurately on the beach. In the first wave of the landing here at Omaha, one unit suffered 91 percent casualties. As General Omar Bradley later wrote, "Six hours after the landings, we held only 10 yards of beach." A British commando unit had half its men killed or wounded while taking the town of St. Aubin. A D-day veteran remembers, "The only thing that made me feel good was to look around and try to find somebody who looked more scared than I felt. That man was hard to find."

At all the beaches and landing grounds of D-day, men saw some images they would spend a lifetime preferring to forget. One soldier carries the memory of three paratroopers dead and hanging from telephone poles "like a horrible crucifixion scene." All who fought saw images of pain and death, raw and relentless.

The men of D-day also witnessed scenes they would proudly and faithfully recount, scenes of daring and self-giving that went beyond anything the Army or the country could ask. They remember men like Technician 5th Grade John Pinder, Jr., whose job was to deliver vital radio equipment to the beach. He was gravely wounded before he hit shore, and he kept going. He delivered the radio and, instead of taking cover, went back into the surf three more times to salvage equipment. Under constant enemy fire, this young man from Pennsylvania was shot twice again and died on the beach below us.

The ranks of the Allied Expeditionary Force were filled with men who did a specific assigned task, from clearing mines to unloading boats to scaling cliffs, whatever the danger, whatever the cost. And the sum of this duty was an unstoppable force. By the end of June 6th, 1944, more than 150,000 Allied soldiers had breached Fortress Europe.

When the news of D-day went out to the world, the world understood the immensity of the moment. The New York Daily News pulled its lead stories to print the Lord's Prayer on its front page. In Ottawa, the Canadian Parliament rose to sing "God Save the King" and the "Marseillaise." Broadcasting from London, King George told his people, "This time the challenge is not to fight to survive but to fight to win." Broadcasting from Paris, Nazi authorities told citizens that anyone cooperating with the Allies would be shot, and across France, the Resistance defied those warnings.