Men and equipment arrive in Normandy following D-Day invasion, 1944. (National Archives.)
Our allies' last-ditch effort
by Tom Sullivan
Men and equipment arrive in Normandy following D-Day invasion, 1944. (National Archives.)
Seventy-five years ago today, WWII allies launched Operation Overlord, the D-Day invasion. The Washington Post headline calls it "the Normandy invasion that saved Europe from Nazism." And not just Europe.
Before the U.S. President Donald J. Trump arrived in France, British Prime Minister Theresa May presented Trump with a framed draft of the Atlantic Charter Churchill signed in 1941 along with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Queen Elizabeth II gave Trump a 1959 first edition of Winston Churchill’s "The Second World War" in a single edition (abridged) bound in a crimson and gold-tooled cover, no doubt to catch his eye. Hitting him over the head with both might have been less subtle.
Commemorations all over. Speeches. Statistics. Vintage aircraft. Reenactors. A friend was aboard one of the Dakotas that flew into Normandy.
Naturally, the American president, an "avowed nationalist" (Washington Post), is delivering speeches in Normandy. One hopes they were written by someone with the good sense not to allow him space to ad lib. Trump sat arms crossed and yawning as French President Emmanuel Macron "mixed praise for America’s veterans with a full-throated embrace of the kind of multilateralism Trump has railed against as he’s pursued an 'America First' agenda."
The Post observes:
The D-Day commemoration comes after two years of Trump either slighting or actively undermining the two principal institutions that have worked to ensure Europe’s postwar stability and transatlantic ties: the European Union and NATO. Some see the emotional power of the Normandy landscape as a last-ditch attempt to ensure that those transatlantic ties still hold.Of the 10,000 who died that day in Normandy, Michele Heller's father was not among them. Her Czech father had escaped his native country and the Nazis, made his way after four years to the U.S. and enlisted. He survived one of the earliest waves of the D-Day landings, the Battle of the Bulge and more. Like many WWII veterans, her foreign-born father rarely spoke of what he'd seen and experienced in defense of his new country.
“As far as the Europeans are concerned, I think the general tone is one of desperation at the possibility that the lessons of history could be forgotten,” said Francois Heisbourg, a former French presidential adviser and a senior adviser at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank. “The lesson of history is that the West exists, and when the West is divided, very bad things happen. We don’t forget that it took the Americans two years to get involved in World War II. But we also know we were saved by the Americans — not only by the Americans, but without the Americans it would not have been possible.”
In the 1840s, half of all U.S. military recruits were immigrants. Today, 40 percent of active-duty personnel are racial or ethnic minorities, and 13 percent of U.S. veterans are foreign-born or children of immigrants.My father-in-law fought in the front lines in Europe late in the war, including in the Battle of the Bulge. The West Virginia native rarely spoke of combat. He did want to revisit some of the beautiful towns he remembered. He never made that trip. He returned from the war to attend Columbia University and spent a career as a librarian. But the war haunted him. His shelves were filled with books about the war. It was an experience one never really gets over.
Why am I telling the story my dad had buried so deeply? Because relaying his experience is a way to illustrate the personal ramifications of anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, racist sentiment. Nationalist fervor, economic crisis and other factors resulted in the Nazis’ ascendance, their anti-Jewish laws and eventually the war that upended my dad’s youth and took the lives of many of his compatriots, friends and family, both on the battlefields and in the concentration camps.