D-Day. What they didn't tell us at school.

Today is June 6th. D-Day. Seventy-nine years since the Allied landings on the beaches of Normandy in 1944. I remember learning about this at school and the version I was taught was mostly about logistics: troop numbers, dates, locations. The part nobody taught me — not until I was much older — was what the soldiers on the boats were thinking in the hours before they landed.

My son asked about D-Day last week. He'd encountered it somewhere — a game, a clip, something — and he wanted to know what it was. I said: it was the day when a large group of people decided to do something extremely dangerous because the alternative was worse. He said: how dangerous? I said: the casualty rate on some of the beaches was more than fifty percent in the first wave. He went quiet for a moment.

Then he asked: did they know before they went?

Yes. They knew.

He sat with that for a while. Then: 'So they went anyway.' Yes. So they went anyway.

I find this conversation — this particular sequence of questions — one of the more important ones I've had with my son. Not because I think he needs to know the casualty figures. But because 'they knew, and they went anyway' is a piece of information about human beings that is genuinely useful. Courage is not the absence of fear. It's the decision to go anyway. Most children's media presents courage as something that happens naturally, to special people. D-Day says something different.