Northwest history professor says it’s important to remember D-Day sacrifices 75 years later

By SARAH THOMACK

St. Joseph Post

Overlooking Normandy beach from Pointe du Hoc. Photo by Brent Martin.

Today, June 6th, 2019, marks the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

“D-Day… not an end, it was a beginning,” said Devlin Scofield, Assistant Professor of History at Northwest Missouri State University. “It was a beginning of liberation of western Europe and an end to Nazi occupation and all of the horrors that were associated with it.”

Scofield said D-Day is one of the most iconic moments of American participation in World War II and a critical moment in the history of the United States and Europe.

“One of the things that’s so important about D-Day, just strictly from a logistical standpoint, was that Operation Overlord was the largest air, land and sea operation ever undertaken in history,” Scofield said. “Just the numbers involved are staggering, something like, 5,000 ships, 11,000 airplanes and over 150,000 servicemen.”

Scofield said D-Day was a culmination of years of planning and was an assault on five different beaches code-named Omaha, Utah, Juno, Sword and Gold.

Pointing the way to Omaha Beach./Photo by Brent Martin.

“The conditions that these soldiers faced were daunting. The Germans had had four years to fortify the French coastline,” Scofield said. “I think it’s also important to keep in mind that many of these soldiers were young men, many not more than 20-years-old, and were asked to do an incredible task – and the cost that the Allies bore is incredible. Around 10,000 casualties and more than 4,000 who were actually killed.”

After the landings, Allied troops would advance their fight and take Paris in late summer. Germany surrendered less than a year later in May 1945.

Normandy cemetery./Photo by Brent Martin.

Seventy-five years after D-Day, visitors to Normandy can see the American cemetery on the bluff overlooking Omaha Beach with rows and rows of white marble gravestones marking the resting place of the over 9,380 who lost their lives on or after D-Day.

“Having been there myself, I can attest to the hallowedness of the place, and it’s places like this that we can begin to grasp the full measure of what it cost to defeat National Socialism,” Scofield said. “Now, 75 years on, there’s fewer and fewer eyewitnesses who participated in the landings and as the veterans themselves increasingly disappear, I think it’s important to keep alive the memory of their sacrifices and also the values for which they were fighting.”