June 6 · This Day in America
Before dawn on June 6, 1944, the largest seaborne invasion in history crosses a gray and violent Channel toward five beaches in Nazi-occupied France. Some 160,000 Allied troops, thousands of ships, paratroopers spilling into the dark behind the lines. On Omaha Beach the ramps drop and men step directly into machine-gun fire and the surf turns red, and still the next wave comes, and the next, until there is a foothold on the continent and the war in Europe has a beginning of its end. Eisenhower had told them they were embarking upon a Great Crusade; in his pocket was a second note, never sent, taking the blame if it failed. It did not fail, because tens of thousands of ordinary men decided it would not. Freedom, that morning, was a beach you had to walk up alive.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1933
On June 6, 1933, Richard Hollingshead opens the world's first drive-in theater in Pennsauken, New Jersey — twenty-five cents a car, the same a person, never more than a dollar a group. He'd worked out the sightlines in his own driveway with a projector nailed to the hood and a sheet on the garage. A film called Wives Beware flickered over a parking lot, and an entire American pastime drove in behind it.
Source: www.pbs.org
“You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months.”Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Order of the Day, 1944