D-Day Resource List
After bouncing all night in cold, cramped steel boats, then waiting all day in broiling heat, the men of the Allied Expeditionary Force got the word: shortly after sundown, they would finally be getting off their floating, seasick prisons. All they had to do then was run straight into machine gun fire, smash the Nazi army, and liberate Europe.
On June 6, 1944, about 100,000 American, British, and Canadian soldiers climbed out of the water at high tide and landed in German-occupied France. Hundreds were cut down before they even touched the sand; thousands more were hit crossing the beach. Nearly everyone, especially the Americans, landed in the wrong place, far from their commanders, their support, and their buddies. But the ones who weren't killed, and even some who were wounded, pressed on into the teeth of murderous fire from defenses the Germans had been building for four entire years.
I would walk into the Carnegie Library and I would see the pictures of Booker T. and pictures of Frederick Douglass and I would read.…
-Clarence Thomas, U.S. Supreme Court Justice