Brian McDonald
Collville-sur-Mer, Normandy, France — The word “hero” is overused. But if it weren’t for the courage of the few D-Day survivors and their friends who fell as they launched the fight to drive Adolf Hitler’s Nazi German forces from France 80 years ago, there would have been no celebrations this week in Normandy.
With each passing year, the living testimony of the hell that the Allied forces endured in the name of freedom is disappearing.
“We cannot allow what happened here to be lost for years to come,” President Biden said Thursday at a D-Day memorial event at the Normandy American Cemetery, where more than 9,300 fallen American soldiers are buried.
Sergeant Major Henry C. Armstrong was among the D-Day veterans honored this week. He’s 99 years old now, but the last time he was here, he came ashore on a barge as a young corporal in the U.S. Army, and had to fight his way off the beach under relentless German fire.
“We were fighting all the time,” he said. “I don’t know how far we’ve come and how far we’ve come, but it was already late afternoon.”
MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP/Getty
“That night we were trying to get some sleep… A bomb went off over our heads and lit up like daylight,” he recalled to CBS News. “You have to imagine, I was 19 at the time, and a lot of guys were that age, and we were scared to death – kids, of course.”
But for the sake of the men serving under his command, Armstrong said he put on a brave face.
“You have to do it this way. You have to do it. You have to realize that these men depend on you, you know?” he said, adding, “It’s not that I was different from them or anything, you know, it was just that, we worked together as a team.”
Military service runs in the family. Armstrong was joined at Thursday’s memorial services by his great-grandson, U.S. Army Sergeant Tanner Armstrong, who is still on active duty.
Having served in Iraq and Afghanistan, the young Armstrong is no stranger to combat, but when asked if he could imagine what his great-grandfather went through when he landed on Omaha Beach 80 years ago, he didn’t hesitate:
“I absolutely can’t,” he said. “There were, who knows how many ships here… The amount of manpower they used in this area alone – it’s unbelievable and probably won’t be matched again.”
The elder Armstrong and his men liberated Paris and then marched into Germany. He helped liberate a concentration camp and witnessed atrocities too brutal to detail here.
LM Otero/AP
Armstrong spent 41 years in the US military. He served through the remainder of World War II, the Korean War and then Vietnam. His life was lived in service to his country.
“We love him so much,” his great-grandson told CBS News. “We are very proud of him.”
Armstrong said it was wonderful to be able to return to Normandy 80 years later and that, “in one sense it’s a good memory – but in one sense it’s a sad memory.”
He said it was painful “to realize that when I disembarked, many others disembarked – many others didn’t make it.”
Armstrong said he would never forget those men who didn’t make it off Omaha Beach and he would never forget what happened here.
Neither can we.
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