By JOHN LEICESTER

OMAHA BEACH, France (AP) — The D-Day generation, smaller in number than ever, is back on the beaches of France where so much blood was spilled 81 years ago. World War II veterans, now mostly centenarians, have returned with the same message they fought for then: Freedom is worth defending.

In what they acknowledge may be one of their last hurrahs, a group of nearly two dozen veterans who served in Europe and the Pacific is commemorating the fallen and getting rock-star treatment this week in Normandy — the first patch of mainland France that Allied forces liberated with the June 6, 1944, invasion and the greatest assembly of ships and planes the world had known.

On what became known as “ Bloody Omaha ” and other gun-swept beaches where soldiers waded ashore

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