Veterans of key battles of World War II are disappearing. Europe, facing new conflict, remembers why their comrades died.
Roger Cohen reported from Normandy and Laetitia Vancon from Normandy and the United States.
They are so normal. The young men who climbed ashore from afar on June 6, 1944, in a hail of Nazi bullets from the cliffs of Normandy did not consider themselves heroes.
No, said Gen. Darryl A. Williams, commanding general of the U.S. Army Europe and Africa, the allied soldiers “in this great battle were ordinary men,” young men “who through this trial with great courage and will to win, for freedom.”
In front of the general, in a ceremony this week at Deauville on the Normandy coast, were 48 Americans who survived that day, the youngest of whom was 98 years old, most of whom were 100 or older. Veterans sitting in wheelchairs. They said hello, quickly enough. Eight decades have passed, many decades passed in silence because the memories of war were too terrible to recount.
When the 90th anniversary of D-Day comes in 2034, there may be no more vets. The vivid memory of their sacrifices will be gone.
“Dark clouds of war in Europe are forming,” General Williams said, alluding to the allies’ determination to defend Ukraine against Russia’s attack. This 80th anniversary of the landing is a celebratory yet sad one. Europe is in trouble and fear, extremism is eating away at its liberal democracies.
For more than 27 months now, 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 memorial service even though the Soviet Red Army’s role in defeating Hitler was crucial. A decade ago, President Vladimir V. Putin attended. Now he talks about nuclear war. It was a time of rift and uncertainty.
Every long-lived veteran who has returned to Normandy knows where such drift can lead, how easily sleepwalking leads to conflagration.
“It’s between you and your superiors,” said George K. Mullins, 99, a former staff sergeant with the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, as he recalled the day he went ashore at Utah Beach with a folding carbine hooked up. into the belt and two servings of K. “We know there’s a soul somewhere.”
D-Day was not an end but a beginning. The Normandy campaign, zigzagging through hedgerows that still divide fields today and flooding sunlight with living insects, took a terrible toll.
Sergeant Mullins, now living in Garberville, California, looked up from his foxhole a few days after the fighting and two foxholes away, saw Pfc. William H. Lemaster, peeking over the edge. It proved to be the last act of this young man from West Virginia.
A German sniper’s bullet went through Private Lemaster’s head and killed him – a memory so vivid that Sergeant Mullins this week took a moment to kneel at his friend’s grave. at the American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer.
There are 9,388 graves in the cemetery, most of which feature a white Latin cross, a few of which feature a Star of David to commemorate Jewish-American soldiers. As anti-Semitism resurfaces in Europe, it appears to be easier to detect.
Allied troops did not step forward to save Europe’s Jews – suggestions that the railway lines to Auschwitz be bombed were rejected. But the end of the war in Europe 11 months after D-Day ended Hitler’s massacre 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 to the European Parliament, asserted that not all members of the Waffen SS, Nazi paramilitary groups, all criminals. Another AfD leader, Björn Höcke, has was sentenced last month used Nazi slogans.
“A far-right party that dresses up as historical revisionism gets up to 20% support in the polls,” said Jan-Werner Mueller, a politics professor at Princeton University. “I never thought I would witness 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 men who died as the allies gained a foothold in Europe are everywhere, their black-and-white photographs mounted on wooden poles on the First Division Road ( USA) leading from Colleville-sur-Mer down to Omaha Beach. In their youthful expression, innocence and hope prevail. Roland Barthes, a French essayist, commented that in every old photo lies disaster.
Perhaps the world, just two years after the Covid-19 pandemic ended, doesn’t need to be reminded much about what it’s like to be swept away by the wind of history, what it’s like to have all assumptions collapse, what it feels like to How the extreme fragility of freedom and life. Surely, with armed conflicts raging in Ukraine and Gaza, there is no need to be reminded of the perennial grip of war on humanity.
Hatred gets blood flowing in ways that compromise and civilized disagreement – the foundation of any healthy society living in freedom under the law – do not. Today, many politicians in Western societies do not hesitate to exploit such emotions to attack “others”.
Patrick Thomines, mayor of Colleville-sur-Mer, stands in front of a school decorated with French, American and European Union flags, symbolizing the West’s postwar transatlantic foundation. “You realize that peace can never be won forever, but must constantly fight to ensure it,” he said. “We should unite to avoid war, but extremist parties are rising and expressing the exact opposite of what we are celebrating here.”
Celebrations have a special charm. The horrifying crater scene at Pointe du Hoc, reminiscent of the still-rough terrain of the Battle of Verdun in World War I, raised and raised questions about how the US Rangers climbed that cliff. how. People flocked to see it and wondered.
Converging from countless countries, they participate in uniformed re-enactment groups. They moved between the fences in jeeps, causing endless traffic jams. They partied, danced and came together on vast sandy beaches in solemn contemplation of how Europe was saved from Hitler. Their children go to museums recreating terrains and battles.
Yuri Milavc, a Slovenian who traveled from Ljubljana in a jeep, along with 18 friends, also in the jeep, said he had been to the Normandy memorial service several times. Feelings are more mixed today, he said. “I remember how Europe used to feel,” he told me. “Now Putin has revealed his true colors and is fighting the last imperialist war in Europe.”
President Biden will meet Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, in Normandy this week, to show the ally’s support for the country at a time when it is under increasing attack from Russia. President Emmanuel Macron, who invited Mr. Biden to a state dinner on Saturday, also chose to draw a close connection between the 80th anniversary of D-Day and the fight for freedom in Ukraine.
“I know that our country, with its brave and courageous youth, is ready with the same spirit of sacrifice as our predecessors,” he said in a speech Wednesday in Brittany.
In terms of spirit, it is difficult to compare with Cpl. Wilbur Jack Myers, 100, of Company B, 692nd Tank Destroyer Battalion, attached to the 104th and 42nd Infantry Divisions. He was so excited about going to Normandy for the anniversary celebration, he said he “didn’t feel like it was a day Any over 85!” To prove it, he’s enjoying karaoke sessions in his hometown of Hagerstown, Md.
One of 13 children of a Maryland family, training to be gunners, Corporal Myers arrived in Cherbourg, France, on September 23, 1944. It was the beginning of an adventure that ended with liberated the Nazi Dachau camp near Munich in late April 1945
“It really broke my heart to see the prisoners reduced to skin and bones and I knew that many had died,” Corporal Myers told me. “I have never forgotten it, but for the past 50 years I have been silent because if I mentioned the war, I would shed tears and be embarrassed. I finally have the strength.”
Corporal Myers said he felt he had to participate in the fight to stop Hitler, but did not want to die. He was a gunner with a 90 mm anti-tank gun, a “damn weapon,” as he put it. A brutal firefight in which a member of his tank crew died when shrapnel penetrated his steel helmet took a heavy emotional toll. The deceased was a Native American named Albert Haske.
“His nephew recently saw me on TV and contacted me,” Corporal Myers said. “Looks exactly like his uncle!”
Sometimes he examined German corpses and found crosses and concluded that despite their faith, they could not say no to Hitler. His Christian faith is strong. He said it helps him walk straight and love others and that’s how he got this far. He believes that hatred is part of human nature, and that the quest for power and money causes war, but all of this can be defeated by faith. “Damn, I don’t even know you and I love you!” Corporal Myers said.
He increasingly meditates on war. “You know, I’ve never killed anyone I didn’t have to, even though I felt like there were times when we were pressed. It’s hard for me to believe that today Putin is willing to kill people to take over another country.”
As war returns to Europe, the ghosts that haunt the continent feel closer than when two decades ago they were thought to have been laid to rest. The European Union was founded to end war and has proven to be a force for peace. NATO is Europe’s military guarantor. These two organizations have held the line, but the line between the world and war is thinner today than in the past.
It’s hard to escape that feeling even during the Normandy carnival. and I found myself thinking of the last verse of Siegfried Sassoon’s “Suicide in the Trenches,” a poem about World War I:
The crowd had smug faces with rekindled eyes
Who cheered when the soldiers marched by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
Hell where youth and laughter drift away.
