On June 6, 1944, the Allied invasion of Normandy began with Operation Overlord. Often referred to as D-Day, it is the largest seaborne invasion in history. A young man named Brett Martin traveled to Normandy to remember and honor an Old Saybrook World War II casualty named Claude Zanni.
Brett’s commitment to remembering and honoring the veterans of this war began in 2022 when he was a senior at George Washington University. A class assignment began his study of the Old Saybrook Zanni family, a family Brett never knew. The main focus was Claude Zanni, who was killed and buried at the Normandy American Family Cemetery. This study became the basis for his class thesis and later a book, For Home and Country: An American Family and the Second World War, published by the Old Saybrook Historical Society. It also became the start of Brett’s personal mission to acknowledge and thank all American veterans for their service.
