D Day + 79 years

If December 7, 1941, was the day that lives in infamy as date of the attack that brought the US into World War II, then this day, June 6, 1944, was the day the tide turned, literally, as an Allied invasion of Normandy led to the liberation of Europe. 

We've all heard the names of the great military leaders responsible for the Allied victory in the war: Eisenhower, MacArthur, Patton, Nimitz, Higgins...

Higgins? That's a new one to me, but General Dwight Eisenhower once said, "If Andrew Higgins had not designed and built those LCVPs [the landing craft, vehicle, personnel], we never could have landed over an open beach."

Andrew Higgins was a lumberman by trade and a former officer from the Nebraska National Guard Infantry. He wound up in Louisiana and was in the business of importing lumber from the Philippines, Central Asia, and Africa, and exporting cypress and pine. Problem was, the back swamps of Louisiana have very shallow water. His early-1900s-era boats were running aground, so he developed a shallow draft boat and perfected the ship design over the decades to come, and just as the world saw the World War spread, he landed a contract with the United States to ship off 20,000 of what came to be called Landing Craft Vehicle Personnel ships. 

Try to imagine the bravery.

Without those boats, the invasion could not have worked as it did, leading General Eisenhower to call Higgins “the man who won the war for us."

Some of the valiant men aboard those landing crafts included author J.D. Salinger, actor Charles Durning, golfer Bobby Jones, and the one and only Yogi Berra, catcher and manager for the Yankees and other teams. Recounting his experience on a naval support craft, Yogi told  told Keith Olbermann that he wasn't fully aware of the dangers, which might have been the best way to face that horror.

“Well, being a young guy, I thought it was like the Fourth of July, to tell you the truth,” he said. “I said, ‘Boy, it looks pretty, all the planes coming over.’ And I was looking out and my officer said, ‘You better get your head down in here if you want it on.’”

We owe these men and the men and women in support roles our very freedoms and our way of life.