King Charles III went to northern France on Thursday to honor the 22,442 British troops who died in the Battle of Normandy.
He also went to honor a generation.
A generation that sacrificed and fought and died and waited through five long years of war, then sent its youngest and bravest to claw their way onto the Normandy beaches and battle through machine-gun fire and artillery blasts to begin the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe on June 6, 1944 — known as D-Day.
It is also a generation that is quickly passing into history, with the youngest D-Day veterans now nearing their 100th birthdays. That is a reality the king knows firsthand after losing his mother and father, both World War II veterans, over the last three years.
So Charles on Thursday said thank you, perhaps for the last time, to old soldiers and their missing comrades during ceremonies at the British Normandy Memorial overlooking the beaches where U.K. soldiers landed 80 years ago.
While the number of living veterans is dwindling, “our obligation to remember what they stood for and what they achieved for us all can never diminish,” Charles said, wearing the uniform of field marshal in the British Army.
Forty-one of those veterans, medals pinned to their blazers, were guests of honor Thursday, sitting in the shadow of sandstone columns bearing the names of all those who died under British command in the Battle of Normandy. Four told their stories, including Joe Mines, who as a 19-year-old soldier was tasked with clearing mines from the nearby beaches on D-Day.
