Picauville, France, June 5, 2014: Balloons carrying the names of U.S. soldiers who died during the D-Day invasion were released at a 70th anniversary D-Day commemoration at the Ninth Air Force Memorial.

“The clouds broke over the Channel, and suddenly there were more ships than you could see, with the white wakes of them streaming back to the English coast and the dark green of the Channel flat before them to the coast of Europe,” wrote Stars and Stripes’ Bud Hutton, who witnessed D-Day from a Ninth Air Force B-26 Marauder plane. Read his full account here.