NEW YORK — Legendary astronaut Buzz Aldrin and the Air Force’s highest-ranking woman joined Mayor Bill de Blasio and others at the city’s Veterans Day parade.
De Blasio said he was ‘‘totally star-struck’’ when he met the 87-year-old Aldrin on Saturday. Aldrin served in the Air Force and was the second man on the moon, piloting the Apollo 11 and following Neil Armstrong onto the lunar surface in 1969.
Air Force General Ellen Pawlikowski also attended the festivities Saturday.
De Blasio said the United States must do more than just pay tribute to veterans. There should be better access to mental health and medical care, and more job opportunities for those who served, he said.
‘‘We are so proud to be a city where over 200,000 veterans live, veterans who have answered the call of duty and have traveled to the ends of the globe to protect liberty at home and abroad,’’ de Blasio said.
‘‘For the sacred sacrifice of all veterans across this country, the 8.5 million Americans who call New York home will forever remain in the debt of their service.’’
The parade stepped off to cheers on Fifth Avenue, as a large flag passed by and Aldrin riding in a convertible and waving to the crowd. ‘‘It’s beautiful, so many people,’’ he said.
World War II veterans rode in a float with one former soldier holding a sign that read ‘‘Thank you for remembering.’’ Others held US flags or black-and-white photos of their loved ones, and dressed in historic uniforms. A man dressed as a sailor and a woman in a nurse’s uniform re-enacted the famous World War II V-J Day kiss photo.
The New York parade is the largest Veterans Day parade in the country.
In Washington, Vice President Mike and his wife, Karen, joined several dozen volunteers to give the Vietnam Veterans Memorial a holiday cleaning on Saturday.
Carrying orange buckets with the message ‘‘Let’s Do This,’’ the Pences spent about 40 minutes wiping down part of the famous wall on the National Mall engraved with the names of fallen soldiers.
The vice president shook hands and posed for photos with the volunteers in subfreezing temperatures just after dawn, declaring: ‘‘This is a great way to start Veterans Day!’’
The cleanup was sponsored by New Day USA, a mortgage companies specializing in loans to veterans.
The group was joined by James Pierce, a National Park Service ranger who lost a leg while serving with the North Carolina Army National Guard in Afghanistan.
In Europe, millions in Britain and France paused to remember the victims of war Saturday on Armistice Day, which marks the anniversary of the end of World War I.
Across Britain, people stopped in streets, squares and railway stations for two minutes of silence starting at 11 a.m. The moment — the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month — marked 99 years since the guns fell silent at the war’s end on Nov. 11, 1918.
In London, the bell of Parliament’s Big Ben clock tower sounded the hour for the first time since it was halted for repairs in August.
Many Britons wore red paper poppies, symbolizing the flowers that bloomed amid the carnage of the war’s Western Front. Armistice Day originally commemorated the millions who died in that war, but it now also remembers those killed in World War II and subsequent conflicts.
Across the Channel, French President Emmanuel Macron led a solemn ceremony on Paris’ Champs-Elysees, laying a wreath at the statue of wartime French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, a key architect of peace between the great powers. He then inspected French troops and laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe.
Poland also held events Saturday to celebrate the nation’s Independence Day, when it regained its sovereignty at the end of World War I after more than a century.
