(There are also other good D-Day photos here on the Denver Post site.)

“Men of the West” manned the ships, flew the planes, hit the beaches, and airdropped in. It was fragile human bodies that endured the shelling, the bullets, and the rigors of what Eisenhower deemed the “Great Crusade,” the most logistically ambitious undertaking in human history… and a moral cause almost without parallel in history.

Those men saved Western Europe from the Nazis and also from “liberation” by Joseph Stalin's Red Army. The final battle lines our men drew just 11 months after D-Day soon became Stalin's Iron Curtain, where the West stood firm yet again against totalitarianism."

In other words, those men saved the world.

There are damned few of those people left, their numbers shrinking daily. You can forget the numbers but never forget them, what they did, or what they stood for.

"[11] Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here. You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet, you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love.

[12] The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge — and pray God we have not lost it — that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.

[13] You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One’s country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you.

[14] The Americans who fought here that morning knew word of the invasion was spreading through the darkness back home. They fought — or felt in their hearts, though they couldn’t know in fact, that in Georgia they were filling the churches at 4 a.m., in Kansas they were kneeling on their porches and praying, and in Philadelphia they were ringing the Liberty Bell.

[15] Something else helped the men of D-day: their rockhard belief that Providence would have a great hand in the events that would unfold here; that God was an ally in this great cause. And so, the night before the invasion, when Colonel Wolverton asked his parachute troops to kneel with him in prayer he told them: Do not bow your heads, but look up so you can see God and ask His blessing in what we’re about to do. Also that night, General Matthew Ridgway on his cot, listening in the darkness for the promise God made to Joshua: “I will not fail thee nor forsake thee.”

[16] These are the things that impelled them; these are the things that shaped the unity of the Allies.

[17] When the war was over, there were lives to be rebuilt and governments to be returned to the people. There were nations to be reborn. Above all, there was a new peace to be assured. These were huge and daunting tasks. But the Allies summoned strength from the faith, belief, loyalty, and love of those who fell here. They rebuilt a new Europe together."

(Meme, along with others elsewhere, courtesy of E.H. Hail, with help from Adam Smith.)

The motive of the 25-year-old perpetrator, who was born in Afghanistan and was unknown to police, is still unclear. He underwent surgery after sustaining gunshot wounds during his capture, according to police.

The man, who lives in the western German state of Hesse and is married with two children, has been accused of attempted murder.