Forgotten D-Day

June 6, 2017: Another sad day in the decline of American news media.

We searched the alleged nationally recognized newspapers for news or features commemorating the 73rd anniversary of D-Day. There was hardly a word of the heroism or the extraordinary accomplishment. 

The Washington Post printed a feature on Andrew Jackson Higgins, the man whose company built the Higgins landing craft that transported our soldiers to the beachheads on that fateful day. But the story focused on Higgins’ entrepreneurial eccentricities — his drinking and profanity.

The Post did give him this due in one paragraph deep in the story: “To put Higgins’ accomplishment in perspective,” historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in a 2000 article for American Heritage, consider this: “By September 1943, 12,964 of the American Navy’s 14,072 vessels had been designed by Higgins Industries. Put another way, 92% of the U.S. Navy was a Higgins navy.”

But nary a word in the Post about the men who stormed the French coastline.

The nation’s namesake paper, USA Today, used the D-Day anniversary to feature a column by a Central Virginia Community College professor, who lectured readers on how the U.S., under Trump, is retreating from the world stage. Standard academic tripe.

We’re not much better. But at least, albeit two days after the anniversary, we’ll offer our salute to the extraordinary bravery of those remaining few who lived through another of those days in the defense of freedom that should never be forgotten.

On the anniversary of D-Day, we always think of one man: longtime Longboater 92-year-old Bill Kelley. On that day, 19-year-old Kelley was a medical corpsman on Omaha Beach. He has always been humble about his experience. 

That’s the way they were: humble heroes.