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Episode #575 of Hometown Heroes, airing May 9-12, 2019, continues our countdown to the 75th anniversary of the Normandy invasion by focusing on three ways in which people cared for and honored the enormous number of casualties that massive effort produced. While June 6, 1944 alone saw approximately 5,000 Allied troops killed, the entire Normandy campaign (June – August, 1944) produced more than 400,000 combined casualties between Allied and German forces.

On this edition of Hometown Heroes, you’ll hear from an American nurse who treated many of the wounded from Normandy’s beaches; learn about the “Mother of Normandy,” who cared for her liberators’ graves and comforted grieving Allied families; and from a man who worked to bury and keep tabs on those Gold Star heroes who died in the fight.

Since it is Mother’s Day weekend and also National Nurses Week, we start with a Normandy nurse who would become a mother of two. Phillida Brodalski followed her older sister into nursing, hid her heart condition to be accepted into the Army, and landed at Normandy’s Utah Beach with the 96th Evacuation Hospital 10 days after the initial landing. Not long after opening the makeshift hospital to patients, they had to stop accepting new patients because they had reached their capacity of 300 men wounded in the fight for those beachheads. You’ll hear some of what she saw and experienced, and you can access her complete original interview from 2011 here.

You’ll also hear the trailer for Mother of Normandy, a documentary film that tells the story of Madame Simone Renaud. Wife of the mayor of Sainte Mere Eglise, the first French town liberated by Allied forces at Normandy, Madame Renaud corresponded with Gold Star families, and cared for the graves of countless heroes who were killed in action. Watch the film’s trailer below:

On June 6, 2019, Vito Mastrangelo will mark D-Day’s 75th anniversary by sharing some of his memories at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, LA. It will be the second consecutive year that he has flown to the museum, thanks to the Gary Sinise Foundation’s Soaring Valor program.

Vito, whose older brother Bert was killed while serving in the China Burma India theatre in World War II, participated in the burial of thousands of American servicemen, starting with June 6, 1944 at Omaha Beach. You’ll hear many of Vito’s Normandy memories on this episode, and you can access his complete original interview from 2016 here, and you can watch the video below to see where he came ashore on D-Day.