Pride of Our Nation

"D-Day" takes center stage in this episode and, being it is still the biggest invasion in the history of warfare, it deserves a lot of coverage. The numbers in that invasion are incredible. I knew it was a huge undertaking but never realized it was this mammoth - a staggering amount of Allied soldiers crossing the English Channel into France on June 6, 1944.

It's stunning to discover how inept most of our military leaders seemed to be, miscalculating things. Here, many men wound up dying before they even got out of their boats on the Omaha Beach invasion, the famous opening scene in "Saving Private Ryan." As brutal as that movie was, this is more gut- wrenching because you are seeing the real thing, not actors, and that means men being shot and killed.

The U.S. also had some bad luck, at least in the Omaha invasion, as weather conditions caused problems that led to deaths.

YET, the good news is that we lost far fewer men on that beach landing than we figured to lose and soon 150,000 men were on the shores of France with a ton of equipment ready to go inland and battle the Germans.

What also struck me as very interesting was the reaction at home to this momentous day. Often in this series, it isn't the war footage that is so memorable as is the human reactions and efforts of the people back home. The people seem so patriotic, so "religious," it almost - sadly - seems like a totally different country than what you see today.