Cobb high school musicians to participate in French D-Day remembrance

The 99-year-old Columbus veteran Charles Maupin remembers coming ashore on Omaha Beach 75 years ago and seeing rows of fellow U.S. soldiers in the bloodstained sand, their bodies covered with ponchos. He remembers American officers interrogating German captives in the shadow of a cliff as a military truck smoldered nearby. He remembers following a column of tanks into the French countryside while they fired their machine guns at pockets of resistance in the woods, their tracer rounds glowing bright red. The 99-year-old Columbus veteran will help others remember Thursday when he attends a commemoration at Fort Benning — complete with an Infantry School graduation ceremony, a jump by the Silver Wings Parachute Demonstration Team and a reading by a President Franklin D. Roosevelt reenactor — for the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the allied invasion of Western Europe that helped hasten the war’s end. - Jeremy Redmon The Atlanta-Journal Constitution