There are certain Patriot days. Days we should take time to remember the people who stood up and bled out for freedom. On these days I get sad and nostalgic and I want to wrap my arms around my country … and the world’s best pooch.

If you pay attention to the funny papers then you’ve surely seen this patriotic pup in action. In the trenches during World War I, he was there. At Valley Forge with General Washington, he was there. And on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, Snoopy was there.

From 1993 to 1999 Charles Schulz observed the D-Day anniversary in his comic strip. The photo at the top of this blog post with Eisenhower and Snoopy ran in 1998 and Schulz often said that it was the most popular of his D-Day strips. In many instances, Schulz received letters from the soldiers and the families of the soldiers in the picture thanking him for the comic strip and for remembering. Snoopy was still good for morale.

The soldiers in the picture are the men of the 101st Airborne and the photo was taken just before they parachuted into Normandy. The story goes that Ike was making the rounds, offering his own personal brand of encouragement and he happened to talk with a young lieutenant named Wallace (he has the number 23 on his chest in the photo). He asked, “Where you from soldier?” “Michigan sir!” And Ike gave him a thumbs-up and said, “Go get ’em Michigan!”

The composite photo is a national treasure and it’s a celebration of leadership, bravery and that uniquely American form of creativity.

Remembering D-Day

• Colonel George Taylor, at Omaha Beach on D-Day said, “Only two kinds of people are going to be on this beach, the dead and those that are going to die …”
• Part of the epic, lonely D-Day convoy was the USS Nevada, sunk and left for dead at Pearl Harbor. It was resurrected, refloated and returned to action.
• On the deck of a D-Day ship, Technical Sgt. Roy Stevens sought out his twin brother. “I finally found him, he smiled and extended his hand, and I said ‘No! We will shake hands at the crossroads in France like we planned’ … We said goodbye and I never saw him again.”
• Sidney Dawe was a schoolteacher who for twenty years, put together the crossword puzzle for London’s Daily Telegraph. It never repeated the same clue twice. In the days leading up to the D-Day invasion, he came under surveillance of Scotland Yard. It turns out, completely by chance, that his puzzles during the spring of 1944 contained words that included Overlord, Utah and Omaha.
• In the movie The Longest Day, actor Red Buttons played a soldier whose parachute gets wrapped around a church steeple. That was real. It was a private named John Steele who dangled from the steeple in Sainte-Mère-Église. He teetered there for about two hours (playing dead and in great pain) before being captured by the Germans.
• Fernand Broechx had been farming in Normandy for five years by June, 1944. Ten miles away in the cathedral town of Bayeux his pretty nineteen-year-old daughter Anne Marie prepared to set out for the school where she taught kindergarten. She was looking forward to the end of the day, for then summer vacations began. She would spend her holidays on the farm. She would cycle home the morning of June 6, 1944. That same morning, a tall, lean American from Rhode Island whom she had never met would land on the beach almost in line with her father’s farm. She would marry him.
• The human cost on Omaha Beach was 2,500 dead, missing and wounded. Total American casualties on D-Day are estimated at 6,603 men, with the first wave that included the 82nd and 101st Airborne suffering 2,499 killed, wounded and missing. German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel reported that his casualties for the month of June 1944 were “28 generals, 354 commanders and approximately 250,000 men.”