Veterans of the crucial battle of World War II are disappearing. Europe, faced with a new conflict, remembers why its comrades died.
Roger Cohen reporting from Normandy, and Laetitia Vancon from Normandy and the United States.
They were ordinary. The young men from far away who landed on June 6, 1944 under a hail of Nazi gunfire coming from the Normandy cliffs 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 people,” young people who “met this challenge with courage and determination.” immense will to win, because freedom.”
Before the general, at a ceremony this week in Deauville, on the Normandy coast, were 48 American survivors of that day, the youngest of them were 98 years old, most aged 100 or more. The veterans sat in wheelchairs. They greeted quite warmly. Eight decades have passed, many of them untold because the memories of the war were too terrible to recount.
By the time the 90th anniversary of D-Day comes, in 2034, there may be no veterans left. The living memory of the beaches of their sacrifice will be no more.
“Dark clouds of war are forming over Europe,” General Williams said, referring to the Allies’ determination to defend Ukraine against Russian attacks. This 80th anniversary of the landing is a celebration, but a somber one. Europe is troubled and worried, with extremism eating away at its liberal democracies.
For more than 27 months now, a war has raged on the continent and has cost 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 crucial. Ten years ago, President Vladimir V. Putin attended. Now he’s talking about nuclear war. This is a time of fracture and uncertainty.
Each of the long-time veterans who returned to Normandy knows where such a drift can lead, how easy it is to descend into conflagration.
“It’s between you and the higher-ups,” said George K. Mullins, 99, former staff sergeant with the 101st Airborne’s 327th Glider Infantry Regiment, remembering the day he landed at Utah Beach with a folding rifle attached. on his belt and two K rations. “We know there’s a spirit somewhere.”
D-day was not an end but a beginning. The Normandy countryside, zigzagging through the hedges which still divide the fields today and which are full of insects in the sun, has wreaked terrible havoc.
Sergeant Mullins, who now lives in Garberville, California, looked up from his burrow a few days after the fighting began and, two burrows away, saw Pfc. William H. Lemaster, looking over the edge. It was the last act of this young man from West Virginia.
A German sniper’s bullet tore through Private Lemaster’s head and killed him — a memory so vivid that Sergeant Mullins took a moment this week to kneel at his buddy’s grave at the American cemetery from Colleville-sur-Mer.
There are 9,388 graves in the cemetery, most shaped like white Latin crosses, with a handful being Stars of David commemorating Jewish American servicemen. As anti-Semitism rises again in Europe, these phenomena seem more visible.
The Allied army did not move forward to save Europe’s Jews – suggestions to bomb the railroad tracks to Auschwitz were rejected. But the end of the war in Europe, 11 months after D-Day, brought an end to Hitler’s massacre of six million Jews.
Today in Germany, Maximilian Krah, the leading candidate for the far-right Alternative for Germany party in this weekend’s European elections, claims that not all members of the Waffen SS, the Nazi paramilitary group, were not criminals. Another AfD leader, Björn Höcke, was sentenced last month to use a Nazi slogan.
“A far-right party that wears its historical revisionism on its sleeve has up to 20 percent support in polls,” said Jan-Werner Mueller, a politics professor at Princeton University. “I never thought I would see this in my lifetime. There seems to be no limit to the far right.”
History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes, as Mark Twain would have noted.
Here in Normandy, the thousands who died as the Allies gained a foothold in Europe are everywhere, their black-and-white photographs hanging from the wooden utility poles on the First (American) Division Road that leads from Colleville-sur -Sea down. at Omaha Beach. In their youthful expressions, innocence and hope predominate. Roland Barthes, the French essayist, observed that in every old photograph there is a catastrophe.
Perhaps the world, barely two years after the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, does not need to be reminded of what it is like to be blown away by the wind of history, what means the collapse of every hypothesis, what it means to feel the extreme fragility of freedom and life. Certainly, with the armed conflicts raging in Ukraine and Gaza, there is no need to recall the perpetual hold of war on humanity.
Hatred circulates blood in a way that reasoned compromise and civilized disagreement – the foundations of any healthy society living in freedom under the rule of law – do not. Today, many politicians in Western societies do not hesitate to play on these emotions by attacking “the other”.
Patrick Thomines, mayor of Colleville-sur-Mer, stood in front of a school adorned with French, American and European flags, symbolizing the transatlantic founding of the postwar West. “You realize that peace is never won forever, it is an eternal struggle to get it,” he said. “We should come together to avoid war, but extremist parties are rising up and representing the complete opposite of what we celebrate here. »
The celebration has an extraordinary magnetism. The horrifying cratered landscape of Pointe du Hoc, reminiscent of the still-hewn terrain of the Battle of Verdun during World War I, poses and restates the question of how the American Rangers scaled this cliff. People flock to see it and wonder.
Coming from countless countries, they join re-enactment groups in uniform. They wander in jeeps among the hedges, causing endless traffic jams. They party, dance and gather on the vast sandy beaches to solemnly contemplate how Europe was saved from Hitler. Their children attend museums that recreate the terrain and the battle.
Yuri Milavc, a Slovenian who came from Ljubljana in a jeep with 18 friends also in a jeep, said he had now come to the Normandy commemorations several times. Today, the feeling was more mixed, he said. “I remember how Europe used to feel,” he told me. “Now Putin has shown his true colors and is waging the last imperialist war in Europe.”
President Biden will meet with Volodymyr Zelensky, the 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 Mr. Biden to a state dinner on Saturday, also chose to establish a strong link between the 80th anniversary of the landings and the fight for freedom in Ukraine.
“I know that our country, with its bold and valiant youth, is ready in the same spirit of sacrifice as our ancestors,” he said Wednesday in a speech in Brittany.
In matters of spirit, it is difficult 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 about coming to Normandy for this birthday that he declared that he “didn’t “feel a day older than 85!” » To prove it, he enjoyed karaoke sessions at his home in Hagerstown, Maryland.
Corporal Myers, one of 13 children from a Maryland family trained to become artillerymen, arrived in Cherbourg, France, on September 23, 1944. It was the beginning of an odyssey that ended with the liberation of the camp Nazi in Dachau, near Munich, in 1944. end of April 1945.
“It really hurt me to look at these skin and bones prisoners, and I knew many were already dead,” Corporal Myers told me. “I never forgot it, but for 50 years I kept silent because if I tried to talk about the war I got tears in my eyes and I was embarrassed. Finally, I had the strength.
Corporal Myers said he felt he had to take part in the fight to stop Hitler, but he did not want to die. He was a gunner equipped with a 90mm anti-tank gun, a “hellish weapon,” as he put it. A devastating firefight in which a member of his tank crew died as shrapnel passed through his steel helmet took a heavy emotional toll. The dead man was a Native American named Albert Haske.
“Recently his great-great-nephew saw me on television and contacted me,” said Corporal Myers. “He looks like his uncle!”
Sometimes he examined German corpses, found crucifixes and concluded that despite their faith, they could not say no to Hitler. His own Christian faith is strong. He said it allowed him to walk upright and love others and that’s how he got here. According to him, hatred is part of human nature and the quest for power and money causes wars, but all this can be overcome by faith. ‘Damn, I don’t even know you and I love you!’” Corporal Myers said.
He became meditative about the war. “You know, I’ve never killed anyone unless I had to, even though I often wanted to when we were stuck. I find it hard to believe that today Putin is so ready to kill to take over other countries.”
With the return of war to Europe, the ghosts that haunted the continent feel closer, whereas twenty years ago it seemed as if they had been buried. The European Union was created to end war and has proven to be a magnet for peace. NATO is the military guarantor of Europe. Both institutions held the line, but the line between the world and war seems more fragile today than it has in a long time.
It was difficult to escape this feeling, even in a celebrating Normandy. and I found myself thinking of the last verse of Siegfried Sassoon’s “Suicide in the Trenches,” a poem about the First World War:
You crowds with smug faces and lit eyes
Who applaud when the young soldiers pass,
Sneak home and pray you never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
