The

The Welcome back everyone to one thousand one classic short stories and tales.

As most of North America, England, and France, knows, recognizes, and remembers.

June 6th of this year marks the 77th anniversary of D-Day, the day the Allied forces invaded the German-held beaches of France at Normandy.

The legendary newspaper journalist Ernie Pyle was there to record what was happening there,

and he wrote three columns about D-Day, celebrating America's success there.

The people back home loved him because his columns often mentioned names and hometowns.

Sadly, Ernie was killed in 1945 by a Japanese sniper bullet just months before the war ended,

but his love for his country still lives today, in his writings.

And now, a pure miracle.

The first of three day-day columns included...

And now, a pure miracle.

Normandy Beach Ed, June 12, 1944.

Due to a last-minute alteration in the arrangements, I didn't arrive on the beach ed

until the morning after D-Day, after a first wave of assault troops had hit the shore.

By the time we got here, the beaches had been taken and the fighting had moved a couple of miles inland.

All that remained on the beach was some sniping and artillery fire,

and the occasional startling blast of a mine geysering brown sand into the air.

That plus a gigantic and pitiful litter of wreckage along miles of shoreline.

Submerged tanks and overturned boats and burned trucks and shell-shattered jeeps and sad little personal belongings were strewn all over these bitter

sands. That, plus the bodies of soldiers lying in rows covered with blankets, the toes of

their shoes sticking up in a line as though on drill. And other bodies, uncollected, still

...