VER-SUR-Mer, France (AP) — came to northern France on Thursday to honor the 22,442 British troops who died in the Battle of Normandy. He also came to honor a generation. It is a generation that sacrificed and fought and died and waited through five long years of war, then sent its youngest and bravest to claw their way onto the Normandy beaches and and artillery blasts to begin the of Nazi-occupied Europe on June 6, 1944.
It is also a generation that is quickly passing into history, with the youngest D-Day . That is a reality the king knows firsthand after losing his mother and father, both World War II veterans, over the last three years. So, Charles on Thursday said thank you, perhaps for the last time, to old soldiers and their missing comrades during ceremonies at the newly completed British Normandy Memorial overlooking the beaches where U.
K. soldiers landed . He said that while the number of living veterans was dwindling, “our obligation to remember what they stood for and what they achieved for us all can never diminish.
” “Eighty years ago on D-Day, the 6th of June 1944, our nation – and those which stood alongside it – faced what my grandfather, King George VI, described as the supreme test," Charles said. “How fortunate we were, and the entire free world, that a generation of men and women in the United Kingdom and other allied nations did not flinch when the moment came to face that test." The British ceremony featured performances by singers including.
