Over the last week, our phones, TV sets, and newspapers brought us photos of world leaders standing on the cliffs overlooking Normandy’s beaches.

With the placid sea in the background, they told the story of brave young men who landed on these beaches 80 years ago, slogging out of landing crafts into a wall of bullets as they began the bloody task of liberating Europe.

The TV footage showed lines of old vets who remembered those days. Almost to a man, they refused to be called heroes, remembering carnage, lost friends, and wondering why they were chosen to survive.

Ernie Pyle, one of my newspaper heroes, wrote of walking the beach on June 7, the day after the landing.

“I want to tell you what the opening of the second front in this one sector entailed so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both, dead and alive, who did it for you,” he wrote.

To Pyle, it seemed an impossible task, as the Germans lined the heights with miles of concrete gun emplacement and machine gun nests: “Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all. For some of our units it was easy, but in this special place, where I am now, our troops faced such odds that our getting ashore was like my whipping Joe Louis down to a pulp,” he wrote.

Several years ago, the late Florence Rosenberg shared her treasured memories of those times with Boothbay Register readers.

Before she passed in 2018, at age 90, she told of growing up in Paris during the Nazi occupation.

Her father, a public works transportation official, was forced to help the Germans maintain the roads and bridges. Secretly, he was gathering vital information for the Allies sending it through a network of undercover operatives. Eventually, after the Normandy landing, he was caught, jailed and escaped, joining the resistance.

The Gestapo moved two soldiers into their family apartment in case he tried to visit them, but, as the Allies got closer to Paris, they left. Madam Rosenberg said her mother took three diapers, dyed one red, and the other blue, and proudly hung them from the apartment window to represent the French flag. She took her defiant display down only after the Germans took potshots at them.

On Aug. 23, 1944, the Allies took Paris, making sure the free French army soldiers were the first to march into town. “We heard about it and, the next day, we crossed the Seine and greeted them. We climbed on the tanks and my God, did they get kissed that day.”

The next day, the American troops marched into Paris and paraded in the Place de la Concorde.

“We cheered them and were fascinated by the Jeeps,” she said. It was the first time she had heard the “Star Spangled Banner,” and years later, she admitted that tune still brings her to tears.

Whoever named them the Greatest Generation got it right.

Meanwhile, back home, we also celebrated a milestone.

Boothbay Region High School graduated the Class of 2024, and we congratulate them and their parents. For many, the end of school is the beginning of the unknown. If the events of the last months or so are any predictor, the rest of the year will be wild.

But, as we congratulate the handful of graduates, we should pause and offer thanks to the teachers who shepherded them along their way. A few years ago, the graduates were wide-eyed grade schoolers soaking up lessons from long-suffering and underpaid teachers. As the students moved to middle and high school, the teachers not only dealt with students trying to figure out how to grow up, but all had to learn how to cope with Mr. COVID. We thank them all for their service.

Come to think of it, the police officers and sheriff’s deputies who directed traffic at the graduation parade also deserve our thanks. These public servants look out for us and respond. It could be a traffic accident, a criminal situation, or a wayward moose stuck behind a garage. The police deserve our thanks.

And don’t forget firefighters. They are volunteers, our friends, and neighbors. They train and serve us all just because they want to help. Thanks to them too.

Most of all, while we honor the graduates, we should take a minute to thank their parents who did their best to cope with the graduates, the teachers, and the pandemic. Both generations faced tough challenges in difficult times.

We thank them all.

Note to the East Boothbay postal customers: Boothbay Harbor postmaster Lesley Blethen said the postal service is still trying to find a new location for a neighborhood post office. However, to help customers, they have installed a mail drop box near the EBB fire station.