COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France – K. T. Robbins remembers the water rising over the floorboards as his truck pulled off the ship and onto Utah…
COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France – K. T. Robbins remembers the water rising over the floorboards as his truck pulled off the ship and onto Utah Beach – the first moment of uncertainty in what would turn out to be months of chaos as he made his way into Normandy.
Robbins served in a bakery battalion, supplying troops with fresh bread – 3,000 pounds of it every day. As they came ashore, their trucks were laden with massive ovens, generators and fuel. They carried tents but didn’t dare put them up. Tents were too easy a target for German strafing.
“We lost a lot of people, but it had to be done,” said Robbins, a Mississippi man visiting Normandy this week for the 75th anniversary of D-Day. “You might say we changed the world.”
Asked why, at 97, he was making his first return to Normandy since the war, Robbins laughed.
“I had to work all my life, man,” he said.
Trump’s D-Day speech: What to expect
UK ceremony: Trump reads FDR’s D-Day prayer, joins Queen Elizabeth, other leaders
When President Donald Trump stands with other global leaders and delivers remarks here Thursday he will follow a decades-long tradition of American presidents honoring the troops who stormed ashore in France and changed the course of World War II. And he will almost certainly be one of the last presidents to address living U. S. veterans of D-Day at the site of their heroism.
An 18-year-old serving on D-Day would be 93 this year. The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that just under 500,000 U. S.
