As the last notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner” faded away, retired Lt. Col. Max Torrence held himself as erect as the young soldier he once was as he placed a wreath at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in northern France on March 30 to commemorate the upcoming 80th anniversary of D-Day.
On June 6, 1944, the Allied powers invaded five Normandy beachheads: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword, in an operation code-named Overlord, eventually liberating France from Nazi control and changing the course of World War II. Following a three-gun salute, the sonorous notes of a bugler playing taps rang out across an endless sea of crosses that mark the graves of more than 9,300 fallen soldiers. Torrence, a Vietnam veteran from Atlanta, said it’s a moment he will never forget.
“As I turned back from helping to lay the wreath, I looked up and saw all the white crosses gleaming in the sun, and I got choked up,” Torrence said. “The price of freedom was paid with the blood of our fallen.” Gathered around a towering bronze statue called “Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves,” a group of Americans observed a moment of silence, some tearfully remembering their own military family members who had served in WWII or one of the many conflicts since.
This wreath-laying ceremony was a somber moment in an otherwise festive eight-day Viking river cruise that sailed round trip from Paris along the Seine. The Paris & the Heart of Normandy itinerary takes passengers th.
