Dad was in the 95th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force. He flew two tactical support missions on D Day. But it wasn’t until a 50th anniversary trip to the  beaches of Normandy that he realized what the ground troops had endured.

“I don’t think the American people appreciate what some of those men did,” Dad told a newspaper reporter interviewing him about the offensive. “Those guys, they deserve all the honors.”

Typical of Dad to say the other guy gets the glory. But he knew as well as anyone what it meant to climb into the cramped tail gunner’s compartment of a B-17 bomber and take off in darkness for the battlefield continent. He did it because it had to be done. They all did.

Now Dad is gone, and D Day has become less a personal war story and more a historical event. But it was a historical event Dad was part of — and he never forgot it. “You were part of this great, massive undertaking,” Dad said in that same newspaper interview. “You were part of history.”

(Photo: Lloyd Wilson Collection of the 95th Bomb Group Horham Memorial)