This week, we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the successful Allied D-Day landings in Normandy.

Historians tell us it was the beginning of the end of the Nazi dream of world domination. It would take just 11 more months for the Allied forces to smash the Third Reich.

The ceremonies featured photos of military cemeteries with long rows of pristine white markers. Leaders praised the brave troops who survived and those who were lost.

We saw the grainy censored movie footage of the landing. Hollywood gave us a sanitized version in a flick named “The Longest Day.”

But, on this sacred anniversary, it seems proper to bring you an eyewitness account of what it was like to look over the Normandy beach in June 1944.

A day after the landing, Ernie Pyle, America’s best-loved newspaper war correspondent, described what remained after the troops fought their way on to and off the beach. One of the first things he saw were the remains of soldiers lying in rows covered with blankets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in line as though on a drill — other bodies sprawled grotesquely in the sand or half-hidden by the high grass beyond the beach.

Here is what he wrote.

“I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France.

“It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water for they were dead.

“The water was full of squishy little jellyfish about the size of your hand, millions of them. In the center, each of them had a green design exactly like a four-leaf clover, the good-luck emblem. Sure, Hell yes.

“I walked for a mile and a half along the water’s edge of our many-miled invasion beach. You wanted to walk slowly, for the detail on that beach was infinite.

“The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding features to those who are in it.

“For a mile out from the beach, there were scores of tanks and trucks and boats that you could no longer see, for they were at the bottom of the water-swamped by overloading, or hit by shells, or sunk by mines. Most of their crews were lost.

“On the beach itself, high and dry, were all kinds of wrecked vehicles. There were tanks that had only just made the beach before being knocked out. There were jeeps that had burned to a dull gray. There were big derricks on caterpillar treads that didn’t quite make it. There were half-tracks carrying office equipment that had been made into a shambles by a single shell hit, their interiors still holding their useless equipage of smashed typewriters, telephones, office files. In this shoreline museum of carnage there were abandoned rolls of barbed wire and smashed bulldozers…in the water floated empty life rafts and soldiers’ packs and ration boxes, and mysterious oranges.

“On the beach lay snarled rolls of telephone wire and big rolls of steel matting and stacks of broken, rusting rifles.”

Then he turned to what he called human litter.

“It extends in a thin little line, just like a high-water mark, for miles along the beach. This is the strewn personal gear, gear that will never be needed again, of those who fought and died to give us our entrance into Europe.

“Here are socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles, and hand grenades. Here are the latest letters from home…toothbrushes and razors and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand.

“There was a dog sitting at the water’s edge near a boat that lies twisted and half sunk. He barked appealing to every soldier who approaches, trots eagerly along with him for a few feet, then sensing himself unwanted in all this haste, runs back to wait in vain for his own people at his own empty boat.

“On the beach lay, expended, sufficient men, and mechanism for a small war. They were gone forever now.”

As we celebrate the D-Day anniversary, we honor their glory and success. But there is more, a lot more. And we should remember it all.

Eleanor Roosevelt put it this way: “We have to remember that in the future we will want to keep before our children what this war was really like. It is so easy to forget; and then, for the younger generation, the heroism and the glamour remain, while the dirt, the hardships, the horror of death and the sorrow fade somewhat from their consciousness.”

Amen.