Commemorations of the 69th anniversary of D-Day started Thursday in France with a flag-raising at an American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach.
Tourists, many from the U.S. and Britain, gathered in the still morning under a brilliant spring sky to witness the flag-raising amid the neat rows of thousands of white marble crosses and stars of David marking the graves of U.S. servicemen and women fallen in the Allied invasion of Normandy that began June 6, 1944.