![]() Miksa counted at least 14 tanks that, after leaving the landing craft, were lost in the tumultuous waters of the English Channel. Nearly everything that could go wrong did on Omaha Beach. The Chicago native was one of the fortunate ones, skirting death that day, when he landed on a 5-mile stretch of barbed wire, mines, barricades and sand known to the Allied forces as Omaha Beach, the bloodiest of the five landing zones during D-Day with more than 3,600 American casualties. “Right there I figured, ‘Well, this is it,’” Miksa, now 90, remembered on a recent May afternoon in his Naples home. ![]() It was then that Robert Miksa, a tank driver who was among the more than 150,000 Allied troops landing on Normandy Beach that gray Tuesday morning, knew that “this was for real.” ![]() Moments later a mortar shell fell right in-between them, sending body parts flying everywhere. Three infantrymen, huddled together, talking, caught his youthful, brown eyes. The beach was already peppered with cutup bodies when a 19-year-old private of the 745th Tank Battalion peered across the thrashing sea as he closed in on the shore in his M4 Sherman tank on June 6, 1944. And an Army nurse who treated wounded soldiers from the sandy tent hospitals of Northern Africa to the bomb-gutted streets of Rome. ![]() A navigator who entered the war on the steely wings of a Douglas C-47 Skytrain and exited it among the celebrating masses of the Champs-Élysées. A part of history so captivating, it spawned hundreds of films, documentaries, TV shows, books and articles.Īmong those who served during World War II were two men and a woman who now reside in Southwest Florida: A tank driver who hurried his M4-Sherman from the beaches of Normandy to the fields of Germany. A conflict so deadly, an estimated 15 million soldiers and 45 million civilians lost their lives. A war so sprawling it involved more than 30 countries from all corners of the globe, from Argentina to New Zealand. More than 70 years ago, millions of American men and women entered into a war of enormous proportions. ![]()
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