WORLD> Photo
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WORLD> Photo
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World leaders pay homage to D-Day's history-makers
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-06-07 20:11 COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER – Barack Obama vowed the world would never forget the dead of D-Day as he joined fellow leaders at the site of the Allied landing which changed the course of history.
In a cemetery overlooking Omaha beach, the US president eulogised more than 9,387 US soldiers killed in the Battle of Normandy, 65 years after American, Canadian and British troops stormed ashore under torrents of Nazi fire. "At an hour of maximum danger, amid the bleakest of circumstances, men who thought themselves ordinary found within themselves the ability to do something extraordinary," Obama said. "It was unknowable then, but so much of the progress that would define the 20th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, came down to the battle for a slice of beach only six miles long and two miles wide," he said. "Had the Allies failed here, Hitler's occupation of this continent might have continued indefinitely."
An estimated 10,000 Allied troops were left dead, wounded or missing, while Germany lost between 4,000 and 9,000, and thousands of French civilians were killed. "We will never forget the pain or the extent of the suffering and may we never renounce the dream of peace and justice for humanity," French President Nicolas Sarkozy said alongside Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Britons accounted for the lion's share of the 1,500 ex-servicemen spread across ceremonies in Normandy and Brown paid tribute to "the brave fighting men of the largest amphibious operation in the annals of warfare." |
