“You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months.”
General Dwight D. Eisenhower
With that opening line from his Order of the Day, handed to every man in the invasion force on June 6, 1944, Eisenhower gave the Normandy landings their moral frame: this was not just an assault, but the liberation of a continent held under tyranny. The men who stepped into the surf carried those words folded in their pockets as they pushed through fog, smoke, and fire toward the bluffs above—turning the Great Crusade from a printed message into a lived struggle measured in inches against the sea, the shingle, and an entrenched enemy.
