D-DAY AFTER SEVENTY YEARS
By William Urban
It was a lifetime ago, and most of the men who landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, are gone now. They knew that there was no guarantee of success; the landing might even be called off again because of bad weather, as it had been the day before. They were aboard the greatest naval armada ever assembled, but not everyone could land at once, and there was no port to make debarkation easy and swift. If the Germans had been able to throw back the first units, those following on would have been massacred.
The movie to watch is Saving Private Ryan, which was denied the Oscar, I believe, due to two of Hollywood’s great obsessions: anti-war activism and pro-feminism. The prize went to the soft-porn production Shakespeare in Love. The Longest Day has much to recommend it, too. Many of the actors were veterans of the war and the documentary format switched back and forth from the Allied to the German side. It is in black and white, which was not unusual in 1962, color being reserved for comedies. D-Day was no comedy.
Patton gives important background. Those who saw the movie — which means a lot of people — will remember that he was yanked out of Sicily after slapping a soldier hospitalized for combat fatigue. Eisenhower, however, did not send Patton home, but put him in command of a dummy army poised to land at the Pas de Calais, the shortest distance from England to France. The Germans, especially Hitler, could not believe that Eisenhower wouldn’t put his best general in command of the invasion. That mistaken belief pinned down major German units for several days while the American, Canadian and British forces fought their way inland.
After Jackie and I visited Normandy a few days after the 50the anniversary, I wrote a column for the Review Atlas:
“My memories of World War II are… from hearing stories, and the rest from the movies…. I remember giving my nickel or dime each week in 1945 to buy a war stamp; I have a vague memory of a huge crowd, perhaps a lot of noise, and my mother pointing her finger and saying, “that’s Eisenhower!”
‘The stories made a much greater impression. I learned the reality of rationing from my mother telling and retelling how [a] relative came to visit, put… sugar into his coffee, didn’t stir it, then left without drinking it all. My grandparents and my great-aunts and uncles… had an inexhaustible supply of anecdotes far pre-dating the war, but it was the contrast of the poverty of the Great Depression and the economic boom of the war which seemed to come up most often. Veterans Day and Memorial Day were the central holidays in my small Kansas town. The war was not something distant, in a different era, on a different planet; it was the central event in the life of every adult I knew.
“The war was also the central event… I studied in graduate school. Americans had gone to war for the second time in this century, becoming involved rather reluctantly, but they had struck down Fascism, Nazism, and rampant racist nationalism…. (W)e were trying to decide what lesson we were supposed to have learned from these two wars. Both political parties had committed themselves to stopping aggressive “isms” before they became a threat to our national survival, but neither had been enthusiastic about the war in Korea. In effect, the debate over Vietnam was framed while I was in junior high; in those same years the atomic bomb made almost everybody realize that Hiroshima was as an important a lesson of the war as was Munich….
“For many years I’ve taught a World War Two class at the College. Most of the time the class filled the room…a remarkable phenomenon for a generation which seems even less interested in history than previous ones (no group of eighteen-year-olds has ever come to college enthusiastic about “that old stuff”). I’ve tried to get the students to hear veterans talk by having faculty and staff — people they saw every day — tell about their wartime experiences. Woody Ball told about his front-line infantry service in North Africa, Italy, and France; Harris Hauge about being a young radioman on a landing craft vessel under Kamikaze attack; Carl Warner about driving a jeep across France into Germany as point man for Patton; Milt Bowman having his aircraft carrier sunk underneath him; Mary Crow describing life at Monmouth College and factory work. Others shared their stories, too, often for the first time; and reliving their experiences always moved the tellers as much as it did the listeners.
“In all wars, at all times, those who lived through the stress, the fear, the loneliness, the privation, the companionship, the exhilaration, have found it difficult or impossible to tell about it immediately. How can civilians understand the comradeship, the friendships one finds in military service? But it is true. Just as college life binds individuals together closer than higher school, because you live and eat together and share more intimately the joys and vicissitudes of life, military life creates even closer and stronger bonds — you literally face the possibility of death or dismemberment together, and you learn to rely upon one another to an extent often not even shared with a spouse. How do you talk about this when you go home? How do you describe to your children the combination of fatalism, grace, and heroism that characterize each wartime generation?
“The passage of years, however, gives one a perspective about one’s part in the war, just as it diminishes the opportunities to tell anyone about it. Then one day, fifty years later, somebody asks what it was like. When the vet goes to the cedar chest, gets out the letters, diary, photos, and decorations, the stories start pouring out. For my father-in-law, it was seeing a television program about B-29s, then spotting his plane taking off from Guam on its way to Japan.”
A visit to the Normandy cemetery is unforgettable. Go if you can. Take your children and grandchildren. The memory will last forever.
Review Atlas (June 5, 2014), 4.
