Columbia veteran shares how he remembers D-Day
Veterans were honored on the 75th anniversary of D-Day at the Boone County Courthouse.
Retired and active duty service members participated in a wreath-laying ceremony.
“They go off as young men and come back as seasoned warriors,” Susan Haines, executive director of the United States Exercise Tiger Association said.
It’s been 75 years since June 6, 1944, the day thousands stormed the beaches of Normandy.
One Missouri WWII Veteran Bill Crabbs said he remembers the day very well.
“It was a relief that finally there was going to be an invasion of Nazi Germany,” he said.
Crabbs was in the Navy on D-Day, but wasn’t part of overseas missions at that time.
“If I had actually been involved in the war, it would have been a different feeling for me i’m sure.”
Bill Crabs’ brother, Robert Crabbs, was overseas at the time of the invasion of Normandy.
“There were 4 of us brothers and all of us were in the service,” he said.
But not all the Crabbs brothers made it home from war.
“He survived the war and then elected to go into fighter training and then was killed… in a crash in England,” Crabbs said, fighting to talk through the tears.
Bill Crabbs was honored at the Boone County Commemoration Thursday, but he said he wishes it were his brother being honored.
Crabbs had a saved seat in the front row and helped lay the wreath in honor of those who gave the ultimate sacrifice.
Haines said it’s difficult to get veterans to talk about their struggles when they get home from war.
“We had to dig into their history a great deal in order to find some of their stories, and to understand what they had experienced during their time in battle and various conflicts,” Haines said. “That’s a trauma that the average person on the street has no idea what they are facing and so we have to be able to give them space to work back into society and to understand that we’re there to support the.”
Haines said some veterans want to talk about what they struggle with returning home from war, and other’s don’t.
“This is one of those things that we have learned about a lot of the WW2 veterans, they came back and a lot of them just wanted to settle down and have a family, they wanted to put that war behind them, they wanted to move on with their lives.”
Dr. Grant O’Neal works at Columbia’s VA Hospital. He said analyzing the struggled WWII veterans faced shaped the way they are able to care for and treat veterans who come back from modern day warfare.
Watch a playback of a live video stream of the event in the player below
The ceremony started at 11 a.m., which is 5 p.m. in Normandy, France. At that time 75 years ago, the U.S. troops and allies had secured all landing beaches.
The United States Exercise Tiger Foundation’s Director Susan Haines said the men who fought “became men that day.”
