Seventy-one years ago next month, a young man went with his parents and siblings to Europe on a Cunard liner, the MV Britannic. On the liner with them was a middle-aged couple going to France to visit, for the first time, their son’s grave in Normandy, France. The beaches of Normandy are where thousands of soldiers, including their son, landed and died on D-Day: June 6, 1944.
The young man, then aged fifteen, had, at best and generously, little understanding of what that couple was doing. Oh yes, he remembered the war from his earliest childhood: he remembered blackouts in New York City, remembered his mother putting the heavy blue paper that cotton came in those days over the windows of their apartment so the “Jerries” (Germans) wouldn’t see any light, remembered hearing planes fly overhead, wondering whether they were “ours” or “theirs,” and remembered his father going at night to stand on the roofs of buildings to be a spotter of German aircraft.
And he remembered hearing the church bells ring when the war in Europe ended—but he was only six then, so his memory was, and is… sketchy.
Seventeen years later, when he was serving in the army in Germany, the horror of war intruded into his faint memory—and almost entirely literary understanding—of armed conflict.
He was a linguist, trained to understand Russian, and particularly Russian military language and jargon. In the unit he was serving with, the best duty, but only for the best linguists, was “plane duty”: the soldiers flew along the East German border most of an afternoon and night, listening to whatever they could pick up, and then had several days off! Our young man was selected for plane duty but was scrubbed from it, permanently, because he was going home for a few weeks of leave.
One night after he returned from leave, the plane crashed. All on board were killed. The official explanation was engine failure, but all the soldiers on the base “knew” it had been shot down by the East Germans (probably the pilot had strayed over the border) and that the U.S. government (the Kennedy administration) had decided not to make a cause célèbre out of it.
Our then-young man remembers seeing the married men’s wives (some of them no more than about eighteen years old) come to the base and collect their husbands’ belongings. That’s when the horror of war hit home.
No movie, not even Saving Private Ryan, could produce the effect of seeing those young girls collecting, grasping at the scanty memorabilia that remained from their very short married lives.
Twenty-seven years later, on a Sunday afternoon, our young man, by then middle-aged, took his children to Coleville-sur-Mer, which is where the Normandy American Cemetery is located. It was officially dedicated on July 19, 1956. Before 1956, the remains of American soldiers who died during the Normandy campaign were temporarily interred at various sites, including the original cemetery established at Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer shortly after D-Day. It was to one of those sites that the couple on the Cunard liner were going.
That Sunday afternoon, the sun was bright and the weather warm, not at all like D-Day, when the temperature there had been around 55 degrees and the water temperature 59 degrees. (When was the last time you went swimming in 59-degree water?) The wind had been blowing 10 to 20 mph, gusting higher at times, which created the waves and surf that complicated the beach landings and made airborne drops difficult—facts you know if you’ve seen the movies.
But on that sunny day so many years later, our middle-aged man watched two of his sons stroll up from the landing beach in their Brooks Brothers blazers and loafers. He stood transfixed, watching, appreciating the study in contrast—and his good luck of not being on the army plane that had crashed in the line of duty.
Today, the cemetery at Coleville-sur-Mer, burial ground of 9,387 soldiers, is, some of its visitors think, the eighth wonder of the world. Rows and rows of graves marked by crosses, and some by Stars of David, remind us that greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for a friend.
Yes, yes, those soldiers didn’t plan to lay down their lives. Most were drafted, although about a quarter had volunteered. But still, they did lay down their lives, and you can, and should, visit their graves at the American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer before you… join them. And if you can’t get to Normandy, there are 156 military cemeteries in the U.S.—one of which is bound to be near enough to you to coax a visit.
Can those of us today, in our Brooks Brothers suits, or BB look-alikes, ever really appreciate the grind and sacrifice of war? Or is it all simply beyond most of our ability to imagine?
There’s a museum at the Normandy cemetery that displays letters from some of the young soldiers who went from America to those beaches, so many of them to die. Their letters show that many had no idea where they were going or even where Normandy was. But there they were, nevertheless, saving Western Civilization.
World War I was called “the war to end all wars.” But of course it wasn’t, as the world discovered only twenty-one years later. Can wars ever end? Probably not, because some things are worth fighting for. And dying for. Is Western Civilization one of those things? Do most Americans think it is? Do enough Americans think it is worth dying for? Will we have to find out?
That is worth contemplating on June 6 this year, as we remember—as the once-young, and then middle-aged, and now old man remembers—those who died for us eighty-one years ago, some of whom are buried in the American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy, France.
Daniel Oliver served in the Army and was trained as a Russian linguist. He is Chairman Emeritus of the Board of the Education and Research Institute and a Director of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was Executive Editor and subsequently Chairman of the Board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.
Email Daniel Oliver at Daniel.Oliver@TheCandidAmerican.com.