D-Day has turned 62

Some think of June 6, 2006, as a date that represents 666, the infamous three-digit number… Some think of June 6, 2006, as a date that represents 666, the infamous three-digit number also known as a mark of the beast from the Bible’s book of Revelation. But as Hollywood uses the date to release a horror movie called “The Omen,” others use it to remember the 62nd anniversary of the D-Day Invasion at Normandy.

Pitt professor Donald Goldstein can see a connection between the D-Day of World War II and 666, saying that it was the day we got rid of an evil manifested in Adolf Hitler.

“If there ever was a devil, it was Hitler,” he said. “He probably was the Antichrist.”

Goldstein wrote “D-Day: The Story and the Photographs,” which is among the many books published by the professor on the subject of WWII. He said that D-Day was a battle of good vs. evil.

“We saved the world. We saved ourselves,” Goldstein said, remembering the historic event.

It marked the “turning point” of WWII, he said, beginning the victory of freeing Europe from the Germans and Hitler who had been in power for four years. And it was the day that put the Allies on the path to winning the war.

On June 6, 1944, the United States, under General Dwight D. Eisenhower, organized the Normandy invasion, the largest military operation ever attempted in history.

But Goldstein, who teaches a course about WWII and its impact upon the developing nations, said that he is worried that soon the story of D-Day won’t be told.

“Your generation doesn’t know that this happened,” he said to some students after class. “It has to be refreshed. We have to get the story out.”

To help refresh the story, he showed his class an ABC special report that he worked on with Peter Jennings called “D-Day: A Soldier’s Story,” which won him a Peabody award.

He did this instead of lecturing about D-Day because he thought that the first-person accounts of the soldiers who were there would better depict the event.

“You see dancing in the dark with Ben Affleck, but this is war, man,” he said, comparing the ABC special to Hollywood war movies like “Pearl Harbor.”

By observing the faces of the students during the in-class viewing, Goldstein concluded that the special had an impact.

Kevin McCarthy, a graduate student at Pitt, said that he thought it was “refreshing and inspiring to see American military forces concerned with protecting Europe from the Nazi’s scourge.”

The special showed still pictures of fallen soldiers on Omaha Beach, images that proved the victory of D-Day came at a high cost. According to the ABC special, 23,000 Americans died in the campaign to invade France at the beaches of Normandy.

Goldstein talked about the importance of learning from the past.

“If you don’t understand the past, you can’t predict the future,” he said.

The lesson that can be learned from D-Day is that “when the good guys get together, good things happen,” he said.

This is an occurrence he said he does not think has happened in today’s war in Iraq, as he said “the good guys did not get together.”

After viewing the special, Marco Velarde, a Pitt graduate student in Goldstein’s class shared his professor’s opinion of remembering the story of D-Day.

“These kind of things are not to be lost in history,” he said. “It’s the kind of inspiration to follow.”