D plus 70

I’ve been following some of the coverage of the 70^th anniversary of the D-Day landings, primarily, I guess, because all the surviving participants are creeping into their 90s, and this is probably the last “big” anniversary that will see them tottering or wheeling into those Normandy fields.

And I really don’t want their memory to fade away.

The 50^th anniversary, of course, was huge—concerts, commemorations, gatherings in the embarkation ports of England, and all along the landing beaches of Calvados. I watched and read it all from Washington, D.C. (Remember—this was before the Internet.)

I was in London for the next big one, in 1999, and from all the local reports, you’d have never known that anyone except British and some Commonwealth troops had landed in France in 1944. By 2004 I was back in D.C., where all US coverage of the events marking the 60^th anniversary stopped flat so news readers and blow-dried reporters could fill the airwaves with yacking about Ronald Reagan’s death. Once the announcement was made, there was no longer any news value to it, and the funeral wasn’t going to be for days, but to the last outlet, they dumped Normandy and produced nothing but 24x7 Reagan blather.

But the thing that has remained constant over the years is the genuine affection and appreciation held for the dwindling numbers of D-Day veterans by the people of Normandy. And keep in mind that these would be the people whose villages were bombed, whose farms were torn up and whose occupation force switched from German to Allied with not always much diminution of looting and destruction.

All that is put aside, though, and what remains is the joy at seeing them again, and the joy extends to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Calvados.

I particularly like the story by NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley on the celebration at La Cambe, a village near Omaha Beach—bloody Omaha, the costliest of the landing sites. It’s great that the contemporaries of those old soldiers welcome them as they debark their motor coaches instead of the Higgins boats of 70 years ago. But what I love is that one of the veterans is staying with a family he met back in 1944, and that the third and fourth generations view him as a relative.

(There are three major military cemeteries near the landing beaches: the British in Bayeux, the American at Colleville-sur-Mer and the German near La Cambe. I’ve walked them all. What is common to all of them is how young those men were when their lives were slammed shut; hardly a one of them was older than 22.)

We see the photographs of “les anciens”—American, British, Commonwealth or French—now, and they’re all so frail, with halting steps and hunching shoulders. It’s hard to imagine them in combat. But I expect that these men and women look at one another and see the 19- and 20-year-old versions of themselves; young, vital, adrenalin-charged, turning new pages in their lives and hoping that they’d live to write more chapters.

I recall vividly 20 years ago the group of 40 former paratroopers who basically got the band back together to make one more jump into Normandy—aging from 67 to 83, with some not having jumped for 50 years. There was an enormous flapdoodle from military authorities about the risk to their lives, etc. The Washington Post’s Ken Ringle wrote about both their training and their actual jump. (Sadly, only the former is available online; and I cannot believe that every single one of WaPo’s current D-Day stories is from the Associated Press.)

But in the end—not even the Pentagon was going to win against these guys, and they jumped out of C-47s over Ste.Mere-Eglise. As had happened 50 years before, the paratroopers were scattered by winds far from the drop zone. But this time it was daylight, and there were cafés open. The oldest, René Dussaq, 83, was only found two hours later, having a drink in a bar and regaling the patrons with his combat memories.

Dussaq died two years later of cancer. And all of the others are probably gone now, too.

But they are not forgotten. At least, not by the French

It saddens me that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these D-Day boys (for they were so young then) are largely ignorant of what they took on, of what they accomplished and of what price they paid. Perhaps if we had an app for that…