Remembering D-Day
This story shall the good man teach his son, and so I teach my own
This week marks the 81st anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy. The names of the American landing beaches – Utah and Omaha – are permanently etched in our national memory, though there were five landing beaches in all. British and Canadian troops led the assault on beaches codenamed Gold, Juno, and Sword.
Between June 6 and the end of August 1944, more than 2,000,000 Allied troops crossed the English Channel. Most of the men who survived the landings on D-Day and lived through the eleven months that followed are gone now.
My great-uncle (my grandfather’s oldest brother) arrived in France four months after the initial invasion. By mid-December he was stationed, with the rest of the 2nd Infantry Division, along the German-Belgian frontier. On December 16, German forces launched an all-out counteroffensive. Only 47 men in my great-uncle’s company survived.
Tens of millions of Americans have a story like this. A grandfather who landed at Omaha Beach. A great-uncle who served at Iwo Jima. A great-grandfather who was shot down over Monte Cassino. It is hard to overstate the bravery and sacrifice of that generation, and it is worth remembering, even as the last of them pass from this life. Soon there will be none living who were there and can remember.
In a strange way, the further those events of the Second World War recede into the past, the less distant they seem.
When I was a boy in the 1980s, World War II seemed impossibly remote. It was before my time and before my parents’ time. It might as well have been the Wild West. Today, I am keenly aware that even the earliest events of WWII were closer in time to my own birth than my birth is to the present day.
Time has a way of shrinking as it recedes.