D Day

ST. LO, France -- Even without the falling rain, there wouldn't have been a dry cheek along the Rue du Neubourg.Men of the 29th Infantry Divisions -- aged comrades with aches and pains and old memories of fighting their way through the fields of Normandy to liberate this town from the Germans half a century ago -- are heroes again.The 29ers parade past children clutching red and white and blue carnations. Past mothers cheering and fathers clapping. Past a new bride, still dressed in her white gown, smiling.

Bud Paolino's being coaxed into talking about his landing in France, 50 years ago tomorrow, when he hears the sound of big guns exploding on a television news program. The whole country's remembering D-Day now. Everybody's playing surrogate soldiers, conveniently protected by time and distance. But, half a century after the fact, the ones like Bud Paolino hear pTC the noise on the television set, and it brings back Normandy.He was 19, married and expecting a child when they sent him over: Eleven weeks on a troop ship that landed in Liverpool, England, in June of '43, then a year of training with the 101st Airborne in a town called Redding, to be sent across the English Channel on the first day of the invasion in a thing everybody called a floating coffin.

Thomas F. Cadwalader Jr., an insurance agent and World War II veteran wounded in the D-Day invasion of France, died Monday of prostate cancer at Joseph Richey House in Baltimore. The former Tuxedo Park resident was 94. Mr. Cadwalader was born in 1912 at a West Mount Royal Avenue home to parents who traced their lineage to a Declaration of Independence signer and a Revolutionary War general. "He was a very modest man, and a man of the utmost integrity. A very loyal friend," said his wife of 61 years, the former Phyllis Jane "Jonnie" Clegg Norrie.

INTO THE USUAL lunchtime din Tuesday at Sabatino's Restaurant in Little Italy, Joe Pizza shuffled, and all small talk ceased. Tell 'em what you remember, somebody called out. Tell 'em what it was like 57 years ago this week. Nobody needed a calendar to check the reference. Pizza was there in the Normandy invasion, June of '44, one of the boys who hit the beach when the Allies finally clawed their way into Europe and changed the course of history. He'd landed in England only a few months earlier.

On the afternoon of July 11, 1944 - 35 days after the Allied invasion at Normandy - Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower came across a forgotten note tucked inside his wallet. He called in his naval aide, Capt. Harry C. Butcher, who, taking the paper, read: "Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."

SOLOMONS ISLAND - Residents call this remote, sleepy town "The End of the Earth." But for the young men who once trained here for some of the fiercest amphibious battles of World War II, Solomons was a stepping-off point. Between 1942 and 1945, the Navy ran the country's first amphibious training base on the sandy shores of this fishing village at the tip of Calvert County. It was here - in top-secret exercises - that more than 68,000 Marines, soldiers and sailors learned how to storm beaches.

STE.-MERE-EGLISE, France - D-Day is recalled in a rusty water pump Raymond Paris used to fight a farmhouse fire as he watched Europe's liberators float from the night sky. It's an embroidered handkerchief an American soldier handed to the first French girl he met, Jeanne Pentecote. And it's a scarred chestnut tree in the front courtyard of Suzanne Duchemin's chateau, where wounded were tended and refugees slept beneath the stars. "I think about D-Day a lot," said Duchemin, an 80-year-old with an encyclopedic knowledge of a battle she survived.

Richard "Herk" Herklotz remembers the barrage balloons thick over the vast D-Day fleet and the bodies thick in the water as his landing craft sped toward Omaha Beach."

Why was D-Day important? Why is it remembered today? Why will it be recognized for a thousand years? Put these questions to Joe Balkoski, and he will understand immediately that these are not idle or obvious questions. These are questions that consume his days. Ultimately, he expects that June 6, 1944, the day Allied troops landed in Normandy and turned the tide in World War II, will live in perpetuity. IIt has taken 60 years for the story of D-Day to seem as emblematic to Americans as Abraham Lincoln's appearance at Gettysburg.

A drive around Virginia's Lynchburg area links history from Thomas Jefferson's era to the end of the Civil War to June 6, 1944. Lynchburg, which traces its beginnings to a ferry established by John Lynch in 1757, is the site of Poplar Forest, an octagonal brick villa that was the third president's home when he visited his working plantations in Bedford County. "It is the most valuable of my possessions," Jefferson wrote of Poplar Forest, one of two homes that he designed for himself. It's about 50 miles from the other, Monticello in Charlottesville.