Before and after D-Day: Rare color photos
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}American combat engineers eat a meal atop boxes of ammunition stockpiled for the impending D-Day invasion, May 1944. (Frank ScherschelTime & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Along the coast of France, June 1944. (Frank ScherschelTime & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
"All the civilized world loves France and Paris. Americans share this love with a special intimacy born in the kinship of our revolutions, our ideas and our alliances in two great wars." LIFE on the relationship between the U.S. and its longtime European ally. (Frank ScherschelTime & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
"I wish they'd get started over there. It will be the turning point of everything. Maybe it will mean our boy will come home again." An Indiana farmer speaking to LIFE in 1944 about his 21-year-old son who was stationed in England before the invasion. (Frank ScherschelTime & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Maintenance work on an American P-47 Thunderbolt in a makeshift airfield in the French countryside, 1944. (Frank ScherschelTime & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Troops and civilians pass the time on the River Thames in the spring of 1944. (Frank ScherschelTime & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
An abandoned German machine gun, France, June 1944. For countless other, lesser-known scenes from the run-up to the onslaught and the heady weeks after -- American troops training in small English towns to the jubilant liberation of Paris itself -- <a href="http://life.time.com/history/d-day-rare-color-photos/">see the full gallery at Life.com</a>. (Frank ScherschelTime & Life Pictures/Getty Images)