Today is the 80th anniversary of the Allied landing on the beaches of Normandy. It is also “the moment when D-Day will slip almost entirely from memory into history,” says Garrett M. Graff, author of When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day, a 19-hour audiobook.

My knowledge of World War II is also from oral history — Dad’s stories about the 35 missions he flew in 1944, including air support on D-Day. He always insisted that his efforts were nothing compared with soldiers on the ground. 

“I don’t think the American people appreciate what some of those men did,” he told a newspaper reporter in 2009. “Those guys, they deserve all the honors.” I think Dad was too modest; being crammed into the tail gunner’s seat of a B-17 bomber carried enormous risks and responsibilities. 

Dad was one of the lucky ones. He survived to return, marry, have four children and die peacefully at the age of 90. Like him, most of the boys who stormed the beaches (or flew above them) are now under the ground. As D-Day slips into history, it’s up to us to keep it alive. 

(Dad poses beside a B-17 bomber at his air base in Horham, England in 1944.)