FEW would dispute it was a day that changed the world. But how to cover the 60th anniversary of D-Day which will be observed June 6? Our first thought was to revisit Normandy's beaches for a look at events there.

So a call went to the French Government tourist office for some archive photos of the landings that brought 135,000 Allied soldiers to liberate France from Nazi occupation.

Or as one retired British officer expressed it ? "to rescue the floundering French". The photos were intended to supplement those previously taken of bunkers and cemeteries we'd visited there on previous trips.

A CD arrived with more than 800 images . . . images of hotels, resorts, golf courses and assorted vacation attractions promoting tourism. Included were just a very, very few war images.

It appeared this was to be a tourism promotion rather than an expression of appreciation for those who sacrificed so much . . . in many cases their lives. In 1994 during the 50th anniversary, that region benefited from 300,000 stays by Americans alone.

Then a few weeks ago we attended the funeral of an 83-year-old veteran and the story of his courage and others met there sent us in another direction . . . writing about D-Day should be more about people than places.

And research showed there were plenty of very outstanding sites in Britain where troops trained before D-Day's invasion that were memorialising veterans in special ways this anniversary summer. Any prospective visitor to Britain this year will have an impressive list from which to choose and we'll be writing about some of them here.

For starters, why not begin by talking to a veteran about his experiences. Until now it's been a subject some preferred to forget and avoid because they experienced such horror, memories were too painful. Partly because of Tom Brokow's book about "the great generation" and this anniversary, that attitude seems to have changed dramatically.

If you have a father, grandfather, uncle, cousin or friend who went off to war, ask them about it and you may be surprised by their response. They were ordinary men called upon to do extraordinary things. And in the past few weeks since that funeral, my path has crossed that of half a dozen veterans in diverse places.

Interestingly, they seemed anxious to talk about their wartime experiences, perhaps realising a minimum of 1,100 of their comrades are dying daily and there are recollections that need to be shared. All had the same characteristic . . . a modest humility, yet pride in what their participation achieved.

We didn't personally know the man whose funeral we attended . . . it was our friendship and respect for his son that brought us there. Daniel Krueger had been in Luxembourg crossing the bridge with fellow soldiers when explosives decimated his platoon and he found himself seemingly the only one still alive.

Somehow, he could never remember quite how he made it back across the river to tell the commanding officer of the tragedy. He emerged from military hospital with a metal plate in his head.

Two soldiers were at his graveside just north of both Great lakes Naval Training Station and decommissioned Fort Sheridan. They folded and presented the flag to his grieving widow, but tapes were played via recording because these funerals are occurring in such overwhelming numbers there aren't enough buglers to go around.

At dinner after the funeral, we talked to his brother-in-law who had patriotically enlisted under age and went off to the South Pacific until officers discovered his true age and he was sent home, only to re-enlist the moment he landed and became of age. He had some harrowing tales about Japanese kamikazes attacking his warship.

Many veterans I've talked to got their final training in Britain. Edmund Kujawa was 20 when his tearful mother handed him the draft notice that arrived by mail. He soon found himself at a camp near Down Patrick in Northern Ireland for very specialised training. Memories of time spent there were special, so much so he always wanted to show his wife that fabled area.

About the time they were ready to go, she suffered a major stroke, leaving her a bed-bound invalid requiring around-the-clock care, which he gave uncomplainingly at home for almost 20 years. Not all heroes are on the battlefield!

When Edmund did sail off to France, it was on a reconnaissance team for Patton's Third Army and plenty of adventures waited . . . including meeting what he described as a friendly general.

One day Patton stopped to observe him with fellow young soldiers pitching pennies for a bit of amusement.

As they leapt to attention, Patton said: "Carry on men . . . who's winning?" He saw Verdun in a very different way than we did as tourists, housed in tunnels built there during World War One, before heading north.

Tomorrow the World War Two Veterans Memorial will be dedicated in Washington, DC. Of 16 million who served, fewer than four million are still alive. Eight hundred thousand of them are expected to attend events this weekend in a sort of encampment of themed tents, unit reunions and exhibits.

Special events will be sponsored there by museums all summer in what is designated as "The Last Great Gathering of the Greatest Generation". So if you're Washington bound, you'll want to look in on some of them. Check www.wwiimemorial.com and www.americasgreatestgeneration.com

Last Remembrance Day, we wrote about the underground planning area at Dover Castle where the Dunkirk rescue was planned. It also played an important role in Operation Overlord, the code description for D-Day landings. It's well worth a detour.

A number of special programmes and exhibits will run year-long in Britain. Portsmouth has an especially long list . . . a display at the D-Day Museum there will feature "Portsmouth and D-Day" detailing its preparation and aftermath, including naval base and supply facilities.

Experiences of local people will be included along with build-up of forces and their embarkation. Twenty interpretative boards will be on display explaining the significance of specific sites relating to D-Day and the city's anxiety as it participated and watched. It will run until September 30.

Museum of Naval Firepower at Gosport will have an exhibit from now extending to January 9, 2005 covering preparations for assembling one of the greatest armadas the world has ever seen.

An armada of 5,000 vessels had nearly 3,000 vehicles aboard. The night before the invasion, more than 800 planes with six parachute regiments dropped more than 13,000 men behind enemy lines. Three hundred planes pounded Normandy's coast with 13,000 bombs before the battle. Their exhibit answers the question of how the invasion was planned, prepared and supplied.

We found the Royal Signals Museum at Blandford Forum fascinating on our visit to Dorset a few years ago. It will be even more so now with a year long focus on D-Day and Dorset.

No matter where travels take you in Britain this summer, make inquiries about local observances. Among those with special exhibits are Royal Logistic Corps Museum at Princess Royal Barracks, Deepcut, Camberley. The Chapel, Royal Vectoria Country Park, Netley, Southampton will have a photo display highlighting the role of Netley Hospital in treatment of D-Day landing casualties. Sixty- eight thousand casualties were treated there, including 10,000 Germans.

A suggestion . . . when you visit these sites, browse through their books and select some for your own collection. As I write this, I'm looking at one we bought at Dover Castle entitled . It contains a remarkable collection of wartime photos and anecdotes covering that period.

As preparations went on for the invasion, its author recalls "almost 30,000 high explosives and 720,000 incendiary bombs were dropped on Kent."

you imagine what it was like? "I never thought we'd live through it," confided an elderly resident we met there last autumn. I'm sure 83-year-old John Bursich, Jr. felt the same way. We wandered into his garage shop down in southern Sesser, Illinois a couple of weeks ago, looking for old tools.

He was a very interesting man, confided he'd worked on cars in this shop built by his father for 65 years. Probably noticing the surprised look on our faces, he said: "You're wondering how old I am, aren't you?" Right, since he only looked sixtyish.

"I'm 83, left here for the war and came back here after 30 months in the South Pacific." He'd been almost everywhere there . . . spoke of New Caledonia, Guadacanal, Bougainvillea, finally the Philippines. Every step of the way had been bloody beyond imagination. But this very good-natured man with a sparkling personality took this interruption of his life in stride.

Like all the others we met, he felt it was his duty, something he did without regret. Those of that very special generation who served from Bermuda will know exactly how he felt. No complaints, a sense of pride in serving.

My first editor at had been a war correspondent in that same area and went back to do a reminiscence series on every site. It was intriguing and deserves reprinting.

My Uncle Jim was 36 years old when he was drafted. He was a baseball player and soldiers half his age used to jokingly tease him that "the war must be going really bad to draft such old men".

His survival reminds us to listen to that little voice inside our head that sometimes tells us what to do. As a supply sergeant, he arrived in Okinawa on a ship, half troops, half ammunition.

Scheduled to go ashore the following morning after the invasion when ammunition was to be unloaded, that intuitive voice told him to go ashore with fighting troops even though it meant risking death. Before dawn, a Japanese kamikaze plane attacked the ship which exploded and sank, killing everyone still on board.

Although Edmund Kujawa always felt a desire to revisit his training camp in Northern Ireland and sites visited doing reconnaissance for Patton, he confided a truly terrible departure from Marseilles. One I almost hesitate to describe. But he's such an honest, reliable person and the experience so embedded in his memory it does bear repeating.

Originally scheduled to sail out of the Le Havre area back to the states, his departure was transferred to Marseilles. While welcoming Frenchmen at Epernay had offered him a champagne toast in the area famed for that beverage, things were far different in southern France.

The route to the dock was lined with crowds of very unhappy and unpleasant men and women, obviously part of the two-thirds of France who were Vichy Government supporters . . . collaborators. The women turned their backs on the truckloads of departing soldiers, pulling up their skirts and mooning them, while the men pulled down their trousers. A really miserable drop-dead send-off when you've risked your life for these people. Imagine how you would feel.

A much warmer memory is that of a personable Alsatian we saw annually when we spent three weeks every summer for 13 years at a chateau in the Vosages Mountains of Alsace. On the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings, he came up to us to shake hands and express appreciation for what the Allies had done to save France.

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