June 6, 2006
D-Day Remembered
John has a wonderful photo retrospective of D-Day up here.
NRO has the article that was was written for the 50th aniversary here.
...."You are a child, you cannot understand," a Dutch colleague told me, dabbing her eyes with tissues. She had lived through the bombing of Rotterdam. "We were waiting for the Allies to come, waiting, waiting. And then they came."Indeed they did. For the peoples of Europe, D-Day represented redemption and hope; for the Allies, the making good on a promise that erased the hesitation of 1939 and embarrassments like Dunkirk. Although terrible battles were still to come and the Germans would exhibit an awesome capacity to fight under the most appalling of circumstances, everyone knew, Hitler included, that once the Allies established themselves on the beaches it would be but a matter of time. In his attic in Amsterdam, Anne Frank's father chalked off the days. In Paris my father walks under the Arc de Triomphe in the footsteps of his uncle Tom Bartley, who marched through on his way to the German border that summer fifty years ago with men who told each other, "We'll be home for Christmas." Little could he have known then what lay ahead of him at the Battle of the Bulge.
It was precisely this restoration of hope that explains why D-Day has always resonated more fully in the collective memory than even the end of the war, tainted by Yalta. At the American military cemetery at Ste-Laurent-sur-Mer above Omaha Beach, the winds are whipping and the rains cut to the bone. In the small reception house, an official kindly offers us help. "Are you looking for someone special?" he asks. We are not, but others are. Even on this nasty day, they have come: a fiftyish woman laying a rose on the grass over a father who probably hadn't been out of Iowa before being sent over to free Europe; a veteran of the 1st Infantry Division—the Big Red One—with white hair and a waist thickened by the interval of fifty summers, standing silently before the cross of a fallen comrade.
If you have a D-Day post, feel free to drop a link in the comments or trackback to this post.
Posted by Ithildin at June 6, 2006 12:49 PM | PROCURE FINE OLD WORLD ABSINTHE