It had been a hot spring in the Dayton area.
Temperatures had been in the 90s a few times, and it was already in the 70s when folks got up and started their day on Tuesday, June 5, 1944.
There was a war on and that was always a present thought. At the same time, across the Atlantic Ocean, and a few more hours into the day, tens of thousands of young men were preparing to go to war that night.
It would have been mid-afternoon, and the men of the 82nd and 101st Airborne made their final equipment checks, put an even finer edge on their combat knives and bayonets, darkening their skin with burnt cork.
Some met with Gen. Eisenhower before climbing into the C-47 transports, which would fly in massive formations to make the attack. The airborne assault was an essential element in the overall invasion plans.
The American forces were to surprise the Germans, create chaos, destroy Nazi artillery, and hold strategic crossroads in towns until the amphibious invasion forces could link up with them inland.
They were the western flank of the entire operation. The British airborne forces were assigned to hold the eastern flank.
Eisenhower had been told it was possible these airborne forces could suffer 75% casualties. After much thought, the decision was made to send the paratroops. The mission was dependent on them.
Jack Reames, 82nd Airborne, who lived in Vandalia after the war, and Jim "Peewee" Martin, 101st Airborne, who settled in Bellbrook, were two of the thousands getting ready.
The American airborne forces were over 15,000 men and flew in over 800 C-47 twin engine transports. Add to that over 800 Waco gliders with another 3400 glider troops. The man in the seaborne invasion then crossing the English Channel, recalled seeing the hundreds of loaded transports flying toward France and the roar of hundreds of radial engines overhead.
Martin, of the 101st Airborne, jumped into the water. Just behind the beach, codenamed Utah. Martin was with G company, 506 Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne. At 12:30 a.m. on D-Day, he jumped into Normandy near the village of Saint Korff Dumont, behind Utah Beach.
Martin spoke about his job in an interview with CBS news in 2014, saying "We wanted to get out of the plane quickly because it was hitting the planes, the plane blowing up, and we want to get the hell out of there."
The area Martin was dropped into was full of Nazi reinforcements.
"There was SS all over the place and they just slaughtered us," he said. "My colonel was lost. My company commander was lost. That's the way we were trained. We accepted that. And no matter how many people are there against you, what the odds are, doesn't matter. We're going to win."
Miami County native Jack Reames and the 82nd were dropped near the village of San Miguel as he was in company C, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment.
When I interviewed him at his store in Vandalia, he told me "I was 19 years old, and at 3:17 in the morning, I jumped into the war."
He landed in the town and began his war from a small garage near the church in the village square.
The casualty percentage was far less than the 75% that worried Eisenhower, but still significant.
By the time the folks back here in Dayton were putting an end to a hot day in Ohio on June 5, 1944, their countrymen had already begun an invasion which would bring the war to Europe to an end in less than a year. The invasion, including airborne forces, landed approximately 160,000 troops on D-Day with casualties of killed, wounded, missing, and taken prisoner around 12,000.
After Normandy, Martin and Reames fought in Operation Market Garden in Holland and then the Battle of the Bulge. They survived the war and returned to Ohio to get back to a regular life. They married, raise families, and live the great American life with their experience and accomplishments — a lifelong source of quiet pride.
They and thousands of others just like them, walked among us.
Reames died in 2013 at the age of 88, and Martin died in 2022 at the age of 101.