Fallen soldiers honored at D-Day rites

UTAH BEACH, France — On rain-whipped French beaches and in graveyards crowded with white crosses, aging Allied veterans on Monday quietly honored friends who fell 61 years ago during the D-Day landings that changed the course of World War II.

Towns across Normandy marked the anniversary with concerts, tributes and Masses to honor the men who died on five beaches during the June 6, 1944, invasion that pierced Adolf Hitler's western defenses.

On Utah Beach, in heavy wind and rain, veterans from the famed Easy Company of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division honored the dead with a wreath of red, white and blue flowers.

The weather was fitting since the invasion itself was postponed because of bad weather. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had originally set the date for the D-Day invasion as June 5, 1944. The soldiers were loaded aboard assault ships June 4, but storms postponed the plan and the troops got miserably seasick.

Forecasts stayed poor, but Eisenhower decided against another postponement and gave the order June 5 to invade the following day. About 156,000 Allied soldiers — mostly American, British and Canadian — took part in the invasion, storming in from the English Channel.

"I'll never forget that day, and the combat that followed," said Easy Company veteran Buck Taylor, of Stuart, Fla. "So often, I was almost killed. But there must have been someone up above looking out for me."

French and American dignitaries joined veterans there and at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Colleville-sur-Mer, where 9,387 fallen U.S. soldiers are buried under an expanse of white crosses.

A choir from Atlanta sang the French and American national anthems, the Marseillaise and the Star-Spangled Banner, and the French veterans affairs minister welcomed the aging "men of honor."

"From year to year, from generation to generation, men and women who love freedom remember this day that is unique in history," Hamlaoui Mekachera said.

The Allied soldiers "restored freedom to Europe, and restored dignity to men," he said.

Ceremonies this year were much smaller and more intimate than for the grandiose 60th anniversary commemorations attended by President Bush, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and other heads of state.

Last year's ceremonies injected a new sense of trans-Atlantic unity at a time when the United States and countries like France and Germany were at odds over the Iraq war.