Voices from D-Day

TICKET PRICES
FREE

On Display June - August 2019

Open daily in the Majestic Theater Art Gallery

The June 6, 1944 Normandy invasion and subsequent campaign is explored in this free exhibit featuring oral histories collected from Adams County veterans.

Seventy-five years on from D-Day, we still marvel at the stoic heroism of the men who contributed to the success of what remains the greatest amphibious invasion in the history of warfare. The Normandy campaign would, in one way or another, prove a pivotal moment in the ongoing world war. A disaster in the campaign to liberate France would set back Allied hopes for crushing Nazism in Western Europe. It would also fray the alliance with the Soviet Union that was essential to defeating Hitler’s forces. By contrast, success would mark not just the end of the beginning of the conflict, but the beginning of the end.

There are as many Normandy campaign stories, from both sides, as there are participants. But absent some formal way of collecting them, those stories would disappear with the generation that made this history. That is where oral history comes in. Since the early 1990s, Gettysburg College has done its share to create an archive of World War II memories, covering the gamut of life experience of a generation that grew to maturity during the Great Depression and World War II.

Launched in a Historical Methods course in 1991, and continuing into the present day, the World War II oral history project has collected nearly 700 oral histories from the home and battle fronts and places in between. 

This exhibit runs from June 2019 through August 2019 and is presented in partnership with Gettysburg College's Musselman Library.