Posted on 06/06/2013 3:29:18 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Today marks 69 years since D-Day, when 160,000 Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, France, kicking off Operation Overlord.
There is no official casualty figure for D-Day, though most sources say that there were nearly 2,500 Americans lost in the operation. Overall 9,000 Allied soldiers were killed or wounded. Some numbers put German casualties at anywhere from 4,000 to 9,000.
The number of casualties still seems hard to pin down because of the brutality of the fighting.
World War II veterans are a precious, diminishing resource all over world. With them passing, we also lose vital pieces of American history we will never get back.
Each day we lose hundreds of them in the Texas alone.
"The data that we have shows that there are about 170,000 WWII veterans left in the State of Texas," said Robert Pechukas, the Senior Community Liaison with the Mayor’s Office of Veterans’ Affairs in Houston.
It's estimated that the state of Texas will lose over 13,000 just in 2013, more than 600 of them are dying a day.
Late last year, the Department of Veterans Affairs estimated that approximately 1,462,809 U.S. vets are still living.
At the end of the war itself, there were 16 million veterans in the U.S. alone. In 2000, we still had nearly 6 million of them. That number was halved a decade later.
The reported median age for a WWII veteran in June 2011 was 92 years old.
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
All the old timers in my hometown were vets and my grandfather knew all of them.
Well Im proud to say I’m a son of one of those Texans, Pop will be 93 in September.
Story out of Michigan about a WWI vet attending his high school class reunion.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3028238/posts
My late father was a veteran of WW II (I was a very late baby).
The day the last WWII vet dies will be a day of mourning for me.
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