Some of the last surviving veterans gathered in France on Saturday to mark the anniversary of D-Day, 82 years since the Allied landing in Nazi-occupied France during World War II.
Veterans will attend the annual Ceremony of Remembrance at the British Normandy Memorial.
Only six have confirmed their attendance this year, marking the smallest number present at the ceremony since the memorial opened in 2021.
Commemorations began with French schoolchildren walking across Juno Beach to mark H-Hour, the time at which British servicemen were deployed.
What is D-Day?
On June 6, 1944, nearly 160,000 Allied troops, made up of soldiers from the UK, the US, Canada, France and several other countries, landed in Normandy on the coast of northern France.
This date is known as “D-Day” — a military term for the first day of an operation. The “D” simply stands for day.
The Allied forces launched Operation Overlord, which led to the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi control.
On D-Day alone, 4,400 troops died from the combined Allied forces. The exact number of German casualties on the day is not known, but it is estimated that between 4,000 and 9,000 men were killed, wounded or missing.
Edited by: Dmytro Hubenko
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