The American cemetery of Colleville-Sur-Mer at Omaha Beach, near Caen, in western France.


OMAHA BEACH, France - President Barack Obama honored the valiant dead and the "sheer improbability" of their D-Day victory today, commemorating the 65th anniversary of the decisive invasion in a speech at the American cemetery of Colleville-Sur-Mer, near Caen, in western France.

"Friends and veterans, what we cannot forget "what we must not forget" is that D-Day was a time and a place where the bravery and selflessness of a few was able to change the course of an entire century," he said.

"At an hour of maximum danger, amid the bleakest of circumstances, men who thought themselves ordinary found it within themselves to do the extraordinary."

This D-Day anniversary assumed special significance because veterans of the battle are reaching their 80s and 90s and their numbers are dwindling. One American veteran, Jim Norene, who fought with the 101st Airborne Division, came back for Saturday's ceremony, but died in his sleep Friday night.

"Jim was gravely ill when he left his home, and he knew that he might not return," Obama said. "But just as he did 65 years ago, he came anyway. May he now rest in peace with the boys he once bled with, and may his family always find solace in the heroism he showed here."

The ceremony at Omaha Beach, on what is technically U.S. soil at Colleville-sur-Mer, took place under an American flag flying from a metal pole hundreds of feet high. The crowd of thousands spread far back from the leaders' platform and colonnade engraved with these words: "This embattled shore, portal of freedom, is forever hallowed by the ideals, the valor and the sacrifice."

With clusters of young people sprinkled among the graying heads and wheelchairs, the audience spilled down the path that cut between some of the nearly 10,000 perfectly aligned white crosses that mark the graves of U.S. dead.

"You remind us that our future is not shaped by mere chance or circumstance," the president said to the gathered veterans. "You could have done only what was necessary to ensure your own survival. But that's not what you did. That's not the story you told on D-Day."

A 21-gun salute lent an acrid smell to the air that grew grayer and chillier as the ceremony ended. Taps played. A 12-plane flyover of French, British and American jets boomed above.

There was a personal side to the wartime memories for Obama. He mentioned his grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who came ashore at Omaha Beach six weeks after D-Day. Dunham's older brother, Ralph, hit Omaha on D-Day plus four. Another great uncle, Charles Payne, helped liberate a satellite prison of the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945 and accompanied Obama to Normandy.

Allied forces charged the shores of five beaches on France's northern coast, facing German land mines, machine guns and heavy artillery. Some 215,000 Allied soldiers, and roughly as many Germans, were killed or wounded during D-Day and the ensuing three months before the Allies captured Normandy, opening a path toward Paris that eventually took them to Germany and victory over the Nazis.

" Excerpts of an Associated Press report by AP White House correspondent Jennifer Loven with AP writer Angela Charlton, June 6, 2009.