Most of my generation will never be able to comprehend how awful it must have been. Maybe those combat veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan could come close, but even then, the death and destruction in the desert sands never reached the scale it did on those beaches of Normandy on that gruesome morning in 1944.
However odd it may sound, World War II was simply the perfect war — it could not have been written better. It had the perfect villains, the perfect heroes, the perfect motive for fighting. And, considering the murderous war machine that the Allies were up against, maybe no amount of rhetoric is too much when describing what those noble thousands did on June 6 — they were, in every way, freedom’s last gasp.
But on a more visceral level, D-Day was just another terrible battle in another terrible war. It was kids born on one patch of land slaughtering those born on another, shooting and stabbing and lighting each other on fire and doing it on French beaches that rank among God’s most gorgeous creations.
Last Thursday was the 69th anniversary of that battle. There is nothing "important" about that number in itself, and it will no doubt be overshadowed by the 70th anniversary, and even more so by the 100th. But in the next 12 months, more of those men of the Greatest Generation will die. Even those who were 17 in 1944 are now 86 years old. The boatman waits for them. He will only wait a little longer. How many thousands more will be gone by next June?
It is always hard for those of us who are young to remember that the old were once just like us, and that the men, hobbled by the years and reliant upon crutch and walker, were once steady and strong. They drove too fast and boxed and wrestled and chased girls on Friday nights. They didn’t want to be on those transports churning their way across the English Channel any more than I would now — as Stephen Ambrose once wrote, "They wanted to be throwing baseballs, not hand grenades, shooting .22s at rabbits, not M-1s at other men."
But, he says, "When the test came, when freedom had to be fought for or abandoned, they fought." And fight they did, like wildcats, with all the weight of the future of humanity strapped to their backs. And they won, beautifully.
We like to think that as a race we’re past warfare on that scale and that the memories of our near self-destruction will always serve as a dire warning about what happens when we let fear and ignorance guide us. But they won’t always remain as fresh as they are now, and with every veteran’s funeral, they drift a little further out into the seas of history.
So we are left to simply remember and hold solemn pride in the fact that we were able to share the earth with these men. And we must hope that should the dark hand of evil ever wrap its fingers around the globe once more, others will rise, as they did, to wrench them off.
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
http://www.northjersey.com/community/history/more_history_news/211326231_Remembering_D-Day.html
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