Eighty years ago, hours before the Allied forces launched a million personnel across the English Channel to fight Hitler’s Third Reich in Fortress Europe, U.S. and British paratroopers painted their faces black, shaved their heads, handed letters to loved ones out the windows of their planes and took to the sky. Some would never again feel the ground beneath their feet. Some would drown in the flooded fields below them. One would have his cigarettes shot out of his pants mid-air. But all of them, together, would triumph in perhaps the greatest undertaking in all of human history, defeating fascism in Europe and changing the world forever.