Today is the 63rd anniversary of the D-Day invasion. Click here for a crisp recording of Bob Dylan and his band performing Searching For A Soldier’s Grave, in Tampa, Florida, in 2002.

From Connecticut’s News-Times today:

Barbara Street of New Milford learned the cost of war the hard way when her brother, Daniel B. Weaver, died during the follow-up landings at Normandy. Weaver served as an engineer with the 207th Battalion. He left England for France on the evening of June 18, 1944, aboard an LST.

“It was a bad day on the channel,” said Street. Her brother was just about to land “when a German bomb hit the landing craft in the middle, and that was the end of my brother.”

Street said Weaver had put off joining the military for two years, while he worked as a surveyor in Bermuda for the McGraw Construction Co. of Hartford. Though the job paid well, when Weaver returned he felt guilty about not enlisting and decided not to put it off any longer.

He is buried in the Normandy American Cemetery in St. Laurent-sur-Mar, France. “Our family felt he would just want to be buried almost where he fell,” said Street.

In 1952, she visited his grave, and every June for 63 years, Street, 93, has thought of him.

[Robert] Santy is also reminded of lost comrades each June. Several years ago he returned to the Normandy beaches where he nearly died so many years before. He looked out from land and saw where his ship sank.

He also visited the American cemetery at Normandy, where 9,387 people are buried, several of Santy’s friends among them.

“That got to me more then anything else, going back to that cemetery,” he said.

Many of those who survived D-Day are now falling before the onslaught of time. Most of those still alive are in their 80s, and their ranks are steadily dwindling.

[Walter] Grapkoski kept in touch with those he served with for years, but his comrades are all now passed away.

“There’s none left,” he said. “I’m the last one that I know of.”

More on the anniversary from Wisconsin’s Appleton Post-Crescent : D-Day burned in Valley man’s memory.

Alex Bernal’s memory has been etched with the everlasting image of the flashes of guns from nine U.S. Navy battleships stationed off the coast of Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944.

Bernal, an 18-year-old medic and ambulance driver with the U.S. Army’s 61st Field Hospital, marveled at the unending lines of planes that flew over the ship he was stationed on in the English Channel on the day historians simply call D-Day.

What Bernal couldn’t possibly conceive were the bloody horrors he would see the following days after he landed on the invasion beaches.

“When our landing craft approached the shores I could see all these bodies floating in the water, just bobbing up and down like logs,” said Bernal, now 82, and one of a handful of more than 40 D-Day veterans still living from the Fox Valley who were interviewed by The Post-Crescent in 1994, the 50th anniversary of D-Day.

[...]

The task of gathering the fallen soldiers fell to men like Bernal.

“When we got to the beach in our landing craft I was so scared I didn’t want to get out,” Bernal said. “I just knew when I saw all those bodies floating in the water I wasn’t coming back, but the good Lord brought me home.”

Bernal said he still dreams of D-Day at night, “especially if I talk about it during the day.”

“I would go up to the front lines in my ambulance — we had a field hospital set up on the beach — and bring back the wounded. Sometimes there would be so much blood in the back of the ambulance that if I suddenly hit the brakes it would flow on the floor up into the front of the ambulance, causing my feet to slip off the pedals,” Bernal said.

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