Seventy eight years ago a multitude of brave young men stepped off of landing craft in Normandy in order to take the first steps to freeing the continent of Europe from the noose of Nazism. Those who disembarked from the heaving, stinking landing craft did not always survive the multitude of German guns both large and small that were trained on the men who were the first to start the liberation of mainland continental Europe. It took nearly another year for Britain and its brave allies, including the Soviet Union, to fight the Germans all the way back to Berlin and smother the monstrous regime of Adolf Hitler into the ground.
The fightback against the Nazis on the ground rather than in the air or at sea truly got going when the Allied boots hit the beaches of Normandy and started the liberation of those whom the Germans had cruelly oppressed. We should and indeed must remember those who fought on the beaches on D Day and beyond and also we should remember those whose deaths were not officially marked at the time who died rehearsing for D Day at Slapton Sands and whose demise by necessity needed to be kept extremely quiet lest the Germans became aware of D Day plans.
Whatever enemies face us today are small in comparison to what the troops faced on D Day. We might face cancellation or arrest or imprisonment for holding or voicing views that others do not like. We might be cursed with terrible politicians who are either mired in dishonesty or overly enamoured with whatever is this years fad, but we do not face death at the hands of the followers of a brutal ideology. It was death that faced all too many of those who stepped out of the landing craft on D Day and their deaths and the struggle of those soldiers who survived was what enabled us to survive and allow modern Britons to fight the battles, battles that are far less lethal than what the D Day landers faced, that are bequeathed to us.
We must remember those who served on that day, those who survived and those who carried with them the scars both mental and physical of their service. I can speak my views and mock that which I regard as mockable primarily because those who came before me fought on my behalf although they would never know who the future beneficiaries of their fighting would be.
