Thursday, May 15, 2008
Understanding D-Day sacrifice
John Long
Recent columns
As we stroll somberly between the immaculate rows of white crosses, I can tell: The student finally Gets It.
My wife and I are in France this week, where I'm teaching a course on the history of D-Day. The Roanoke College Choir, under the direction of my dauntless friend Jeff Sandborg, is on a concert tour through Normandy, Paris and Southern France. His choristers are, of course, college students, and about half of them need to take a May term course to be on target to graduate. Ergo, I get to tag along as instructor for IL 477: D-Day and the Liberation of France.
If you don't know much about DDay, the invasion of Normandy by Allied forces on June 6, 1944, beginning the final chapter of the war in Europe, you can ask one of my students. By now, they should be able to recite the basics in their sleep: Higgins Boats, five beachheads, German pillboxes, hedgerows and hedgehogs. The cruelly named Easy Red sector, the 82nd and the 101st, the 116th of the 29th, Thunder and Flash. Maybe unrecognizable jargon to you, but they know this stuff.
Yet I want more than barren facts rattled off. I want them to Get It.
We stop at the beaches. OK -- maybe they can picture it, but the scenery they peruse is so much different than on that chilly June day 64 years ago. Omaha Beach is a tourist destination to them, not a deathtrap. Still, a few reverentially scoop up sand or write a tribute in it.
We visit a number of museums and historic sites. We see the mannequin of a paratrooper that still hangs off of the steeple at Sainte Mere Eglise. We see shell holes in 500-year-old cathedrals and massive craters left by naval gunnery at Pointe du Hoc. Older natives of the region tell us what they remember, what they'll never forget. (Sometimes we think them ungrateful, but France remembers. Normandy especially).
Before leaving for France, the class assembled a number of times. We read about D-Day and watched clips of movies and newsreels. We learned that the American military went to war for reasons historically unprecedented. Not to win territory, not to oppress, not to plunder. But to liberate.
General Eisenhower assigned this mission in his Order of the Day on June 6, 1944. In a leaflet distributed to the invasion personnel and later read on the radio, Ike challenged his men: ""Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world."
A tough mission, and they got it done -- but at great cost.
My students met the intrepid veteran Bob Slaughter in February, and visited the National D-Day Memorial in April. All of this made an impact, but not like the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer.
A white cross, occasionally a Star of David, with a name, a rank, a date. Not much info. But the student begins to sense the stories here. This boy left everything he knew, put on a uniform, allowed himself to be remade into a soldier. He trained incessantly to do a single task on a single day. If he was at Omaha Beach, he probably found that task impossible.
Maybe he only got a few steps into France. Maybe he drowned before getting that far. But if he was one of the lucky ones who made it to the shingle, then the bluff, he improvised and found a way to win the beach, win the day. That was and is the great advantage of an army of democracy over one of totalitarianism. Innovation is encouraged, not punished.
But then he died, probably screaming for his earthly mother or praying to his heavenly Father. And the student, standing next to his cross, eyes welling, finally Gets It.
Long before I was born, thinks the student, he died for me.
And he was exactly my age.
Long, a Roanoke Times columnist, is director of the Salem Museum and teaches history at Roanoke College.
