Veterans of the pivotal battle of World War II are disappearing. Europe, faced with a new conflict, remembers why its comrades died.
Roger Cohen reported from Normandy and Laetitia Vancon of Normandy and the United States.
They were normal. The young people who came from afar who landed on June 6, 1944, under a hail of Nazi gunfire from the cliffs of Normandy, did not consider themselves heroes.
No, said Gen. Darryl A. Williams, commanding general of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, the Allied soldiers “in this great battle were ordinary young men,” young men who “faced this challenge with courage and tremendous will.” to win, for freedom.”
In front of the general, during a ceremony this week in Deauville, on the Normandy coast, were 48 American survivors of that day, the youngest of them 98, most of them 100 years old or older. The veterans were sitting in wheelchairs. They greeted rather quickly. Eight decades have passed, many of them spent in silence because the memories of the war were too terrible to recount.
When the 90th anniversary of D-Day rolls around in 2034, there may be no more vets. The living memory of the beaches of their sacrifice will no longer exist.
“Dark clouds of war are gathering in Europe,” General Williams said, alluding to the Allies’ determination to defend Ukraine against Russian attack. This 80th anniversary of the landing is a celebration, but a somber one. Europe is worried and apprehensive, and extremism is devouring its liberal democracies.
For more than 27 months there has been a war on the continent that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians and Russians. Russia was not invited to the commemoration even though the Soviet Red Army’s role in Hitler’s defeat was fundamental. A decade ago, President Vladimir V. Putin attended. He now talks about nuclear war. It is a time of fissures and uncertainty.
Each of the long-lived veterans who returned to Normandy knows where that drift can lead, how easy it is to sleepwalk into the conflagration.
“It’s between you and your superiors,” said George K. Mullins, 99, a former sergeant with the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne, as he recalled the day he landed on Utah Beach with a carbine hooked folding. to his belt and two K rations. “We know there’s a spirit somewhere.”
D-Day was not an end but a beginning. The Normandy campaign, zigzagging through the hedgerows that still divide the fields today and teeming with insects in the sunlight, took a terrible toll.
Sergeant Mullins, who now lives in Garberville, California, looked up from his trench a couple of days into the fighting and, two trenches away, saw Pfc. William H. Lemaster, peeking over the edge. It turned out to be the last act for this young man from West Virginia.
A German sniper’s bullet passed through Private Lemaster’s head and killed him, a memory so vivid that Sergeant Mullins took a moment this week to kneel at his friend’s grave at the Colleville-sur-Mer American Cemetery.
There are 9,388 graves in the cemetery, most of them in the shape of white Latin crosses, a handful of them with Stars of David commemorating American Jewish service members. As anti-Semitism rises again in Europe, they somehow seem more noticeable.
The allied army did not advance to save the Jews of Europe; Suggestions that the railways to Auschwitz be bombed were rejected. But the end of the war in Europe, 11 months after D-Day, put an end to Hitler’s slaughter of six million Jews.
Today in Germany, Maximilian Krah, the leading candidate of the far-right Alternative for Germany party in this weekend’s elections for the European Parliament, claims that not all members of the Waffen SS, the Nazi paramilitary group, were criminals . Another AfD leader, Björn Höcke, was convicted last month for using a Nazi slogan.
“A far-right party that wears its historical revisionism on its sleeve has up to 20 percent support in the polls,” said Jan-Werner Mueller, a politics professor at Princeton University. “I never thought I would see this in my life. “There seems to be no limit to how far the far right will go.”
History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme, as Mark Twain is said to have noted.
Here in Normandy, the thousands of people who died when the Allies secured their presence in Europe are everywhere, their black and white photographs taped to wooden posts on the First (American) Division road leading from Colleville- sur-Mer to Omaha Beach. Innocence and hope predominate in his youthful expressions. Roland Barthes, the French essayist, observed that a catastrophe is hidden in every old photograph.
Perhaps the world, just two years after the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, does not need to be reminded what it means to be swept away by the gale of history, what it means to have every assumption crumbled, what it is to feel the extreme fragility of freedom and life. Certainly, with armed conflicts ravaging Ukraine and Gaza, there is no need to remember war’s perennial grip on humanity.
Hate gets the blood pumping in a way that reasoned compromise and civilized disagreement—foundations of any healthy society living freely under the rule of law—do not. Today, many politicians in Western societies do not hesitate to take advantage of these emotions to attack the “other.”
Patrick Thomines, mayor of Colleville-sur-Mer, stood in front of a school adorned with the French, American and European Union flags, symbolizing the West’s postwar transatlantic founding. “You realize that peace is never achieved forever; it is an eternal struggle to secure it,” he said. “We should unite to avoid war, but extremist parties are emerging that represent the complete opposite of what we are celebrating here.”
The celebration has an extraordinary magnetism. The horrific, cratered landscape at Pointe du Hoc, reminiscent of the still pitted terrain of the Battle of Verdun in World War I, raises and begs the question of how the American Rangers scaled that cliff. People flock to see it and marvel.
Coming from countless countries, they join uniformed recreation groups. They travel in jeeps between the hedges, causing endless traffic jams. They party, dance and gather on the vast, wide sandy beaches to solemnly contemplate how Europe was saved from Hitler. Their children go to museums that recreate the terrain and the battle.
Yuri Milavc, a Slovenian who had traveled from Ljubljana in a jeep with 18 friends, also in jeeps, said he had already attended the Normandy commemorations several times. The sentiment today was more mixed, he said. “I remember what Europe once felt like,” he told me. “Now Putin has shown his true colors and is fighting the last imperialist war in Europe.”
President Biden will meet with Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine, in Normandy this week, a show of allied support for the country at a time when it is under increased Russian attack. President Emmanuel Macron, who invited Biden to a state dinner on Saturday, also decided to draw a strong link between the 80th anniversary of D-Day and the fight for freedom in Ukraine.
“I know that our country, with its bold and brave youth, is prepared with the same spirit of sacrifice as our ancestors,” he said in a speech Wednesday in Brittany.
When it comes to spirit, it’s hard to match that of Cpl. Wilbur Jack Myers, 100, of Company B, 692nd Tank Destroyer Battalion, attached to the 104th and 42nd Infantry Divisions. He was so excited to come to Normandy for the anniversary that he said he “didn’t feel like he was over 85.” To prove it, he has been enjoying karaoke sessions at his home in Hagerstown, Maryland.
Corporal Myers, one of 13 children in a Maryland family, trained to be an artilleryman, arrived in Cherbourg, France, on September 23, 1944. It was the beginning of an odyssey that ended with the liberation of the Nazi camp at Dachau, near Munich, at the end of April 1945.
“It really hurt me to look at those skin and bones prisoners, and I knew many were already dead,” Corporal Myers told me. “I have never forgotten it, but for 50 years I was silent because if I tried to talk about the war I would burst into tears and I would be ashamed. Finally, I got the strength.”
Corporal Myers said he felt he had to be part of the fight to stop Hitler, but he did not want to die. He was a gunner with a 90mm anti-tank gun, an “incredible weapon,” as he put it. A devastating firefight in which a member of his tank crew was killed when shrapnel tore through his steel hull took a heavy emotional toll. The dead man was a Native American named Albert Haske.
“Recently, his great-great-grandfather saw me on television and contacted me,” Corporal Myers said. “He looks like his uncle!”
Sometimes he would examine German corpses and find crucifixes and come to the conclusion that, despite their faith, they could not say no to Hitler. His own Christian faith is strong. He said that keeps him walking straight and loving others and that’s how he got here. He believes that hate is part of human nature, and the pursuit of power and money causes wars, but all of this can be overcome with faith. “Damn, I don’t even know you and I love you!” Corporal Myers said.
He became meditative about the war. “You know, I never killed anyone if it wasn’t necessary, although I often felt that way when we were immobilized. “I find it hard to believe that today Putin is so willing to kill to take over other countries.”
With the return of war to Europe, the ghosts that have haunted the continent feel closer, when two decades ago they seemed to have been buried. The European Union was created to end war and has proven to be a magnet for peace. NATO has been Europe’s military guarantor. The two institutions have held the line, but the line between the world and war seems more fragile today than it has in a long time.
It has been difficult to escape that feeling even in a festive Normandy. and I found myself thinking about the last verse of “Suicide in the Trenches” by Siegfried Sassoon, a poem from World War I:
You crowds with smug faces and burning eyes.
who applaud when the boy soldiers pass by,
Sneak home and pray you never know
To hell where youth and laughter go.