Seventy-eight years ago today General Dwight D. Eisenhower,
Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe
and future President of the United States of America,
directed the largest amphibious force ever assembled to storm
the beaches of Normandy in France. The liberation of occupied Europe
from the forces of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich had begun.
Less than a year later, Hitler was gone, and the defeated German Army
surrendered to the Allied conquerors. It was not long afterwards, that
reports began to surface of a great human tragedy, which the Americans and
British and other allied troops uncovered in Nazi death camps across Europe.
Some of the same American men who bravely stormed the beaches and scaled
the cliffs at Normandy now liberated emaciated survivors waiting for them
in Buchenwald, Dachau, Dora- Mittlebau, and Flossenburg.
In May, 1945, almost a year after the invasion began, American forces
liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp.
To the brave young American men, the liberators of Europe, many of whom died
for the cause of freedom, and many of whom bore the physical and emotional scars
of war after coming home again, to this greatest generation of American heroes,
who taught us that freedom is never free and must be fought for in order to
be preserved for future generations, I dedicate this post.
Thank you for your service and for my freedom.
May God bless you always.
And slavery clank her galling chains:
We see them not; we trust in God:
New England's God forever reigns."
-An Anthem of the American Revolution
(1778)
William Billings
(1746-1800)
American choral composer
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