Today is the 72nd anniversary of D-Day.

Allied forces began the fight to retake Europe from Nazi Germany with an invasion that began at the beaches in Normandy along the coast of France. The numbers are stunning: in one single day, more than 160,000 troops made the beach landing, with 5000 landing and assault craft, 289 escort vessels, and 277 minesweepers taking part. By the end of the day, more than 10,000 American and British troops were dead, as were more than 1000 Germans.

About a month after the invasion, General Dwight D. Eisenhower showed an aide a handwritten note he had written the night before Operation Overlord began. It was an “In case of failure” note and it is only four sentences long, but it gives a sense of the his integrity and how much was riding on the 150,000-man invasion of France. It reads (after the jump):
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On this date in 1783, the Montgolfier brothers (Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne) gave a public demonstration of their invention: the hot-air balloon. It was unmanned, flew for about ten minutes, and covered about a mile. (At top, floating above these words, is a contemporary depiction of the event.)

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The Centers for Disease Control published an article with the title, “Pneumocycstis Pneumonia—Los Angeles,” 35 years ago today. It described the appearance of cases of a rare form of pneumonia in five gay men in Los Angeles. This article is acknowledged as the first reporting of cases in the AIDS epidemic.
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A six-week-long demonstration on behalf of democracy in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, in which more than a million people peacefully assembled and made their voices heard, was quashed with tanks and armed troops and gunfire on this date in 1989. Trucks, tanks, and soldiers and police on foot surged into the protest while firing their weapons at will. Even onlookers in nearby buildings were hit.

Very little verified information ever made it out in the aftermath. The Chinese government does not acknowledge the massacre and in official publications the event is euphemistically called the “June 4 Incident.”

The identity of one man who was wearing a white long-sleeved shirt and swinging a bag of what appeared to be his week’s groceries in one hand while he held up the line of tanks for a precious few minutes the day after the massacre remains unknown and ever-unknowable. The lack of information is indicated by the estimated number of injured and dead: it is believed that the number of dead lies somewhere between 241 (the government’s announced claim, although it further claimed that no one died in the square itself) and several thousand were killed by the Chinese government and upwards of 10,000 were injured.

CNN’s coverage that day (below the jump):
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