Next year, it will be roughly two-thirds of a century since the Normandy landing. The ceremonies on the beach had been held every ten years up until 2004. I remember the 1974 anniversary, and my mother, who had been a WAC in Egypt, commenting that she couldn’t believe that it had been thirty years. It’s sobering to realize now, as my age is close to hers then, that the landing was as close to her in time as the Iranian revolution and the worst of the Carter era is to me now.
Anyway, today’s ceremony has been only five years since the last one, because it won’t be long before there are no survivors left. The youngest of the men who stormed Juno, Gold, Sword, Omaha are eighty-three years old, and many of them are older, and they are dying by the hundreds each year as their ages advance. There will be many fewer on the seventieth anniversary, and just a handful, if any on the eightieth.
When they’re all gone, will European and North American leaders still gather on the once blood-soaked sand to commemorate their sacrifice and bravery? If so, for how many more years, before it becomes an event in long-forgotten history, irrelevant to those generations? We no longer have such ceremonies at Gettysburg, a similar watermark in political and military history, because no one alive remembers it first hand. Has any president given a speech there on the anniversary (the nation’s birthday)? Has any made a speech there on any day since Lincoln made his famous address only a few months after the event? I suspect that as time goes on, no one will show up at Normandy on June 6 except history buffs. The “greatest generation” is passing, and with them, an era.
[Update in the afternoon]
It occurs to me that this is probably the first such event at which none of the leaders speaking at it were alive when the landing occurred. G. W. Bush was born just after the war, but in 2004, Chirac gave a speech, and he was twelve years old when France was liberated. I’m pretty sure that Sarkozy, Harper, Brown and Obama are all baby boomers.
[Update a while later]
Lots of D-Day posts and links over at Aaarrrggghhh (not a permalink, just scroll).
It is sobering to realize that World War II is passing out of living memory.
…and being rewritten to make us the villain.
>>Has any president given a speech there on the anniversary (the nation’s birthday)? Has any made a speech there on any day since Lincoln made his famous address only a few months after the event?<<
Rand,
The Battle of Gettysburg was fought from July 1 to July 3, 1863, not on the 4th. There was a major reunion there in 1913 with many veterans from both sides. I don’t know if President Wilson addressed them or not but it did see the first great reenactment of Pickett’s Charge. All of the aging veterans took their places on one side or the other. But when the Southerners broke out of the wood line and started up toward the old Union positions, an audible groan was heard from the top of Cemetery Hill. All of the Northerners left their positions and came hobbling down the hill to meet their former enemies and embrace them, giving and receiving forgiveness. It must have been truly incredible.
I don’t know how many presidents may have spoken there since. I think the idea of routine commemorations of such things is a rather recent one. Once Abraham Lincoln had said what he had to say about it that was pretty much all there was to say. However, I do know that there was one last reunion of Blue and Grey at Gettysburg in 1933 which was addressed by Franklin Roosevelt.
The Battle of Gettysburg was fought from July 1 to July 3, 1863, not on the 4th.
Yes, it ended on the third, but the fourth was a time of celebration for the North, not just because they had won a great victory albeit at a terrible price, but because Vicksburg fell that day as well, taking the Mississippi and cutting the Confederacy in half. It would make sense to commemorate it on that day, as opposed to having to pick one of the previous (though I suppose Pickett’s Charge on the third could be considered the point of victory).
My father and were just teenagers when WWII was over, 13 and 14 respectively. And I know the news was different then, than it was in 1967 / 1968 when I was that age. But I’ve never been able to reconcile their lack of memories of the war. They just always say, “…the war just ‘was’, it was all anyone knew.” It just seems odd to me.
I couldn’t forget Viet Nam if I wanted to.
The youngest of the men who stormed Juno, Gold, Sword, Omaha are eighty-three years old, and many of them are older, and they are dying by the hundreds each year as their ages advance.
You forgot to mention Utah beach. Also, there were over 20,000 paratroopers who descended in parachutes and gliders hours before those men stormed the beaches. They were supported by tens of thousands of men in ships and planes. It was a truly monumental undertaking.
Just a minor, but perhaps significant, observation. This is the first D-Day anniversary I can remember where there wasn’t a single television program on the subject. No Turner Classic Movie of “The Longest Day,” no repeat of “Saving Private Ryan” on HBO or SHO, nothing on the History, Discovery, or Military channels. Nothing. Very odd.
I believe that there were a number of annual events for the Battle of Shiloh as well. In fact, the Northerners formed up a ‘Veterans of the Hornet’s Nest Brigade’. The Hornet’s Nest was named after a clearing in the thicket that saw a great deal of intense fight. The confederates attempted to split the Union line in the center to divide and conquer. The Union was taken by surprise and outnumbered for a time and wave after wave of confederate soldiers attacked. If the confederates had broken the center than the line would have been split and easily surrounded. The Union literally snatched victory from jaws of defeat. They held the center and slowed down Confederate advance buying time for other elements to regroup and fall back in an organized fashion. Not many people remember that there were nearly 25,000 causalities on both sides for that battle.
Here in New Zealand we commemorate the ANZAC landings at Gallipoli with a pre-dawn ceremony on April 25 each year.
Here’s a photo I took last year, here in Wellington: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brucehoult/2510360059/sizes/l/
It’s been noted that in recent years the number of people attending has been quite noticeably increasing, especially young people in their 20’s and 30’s.
Lest We Forget
Michael S. Kelly: actually, the History Channel had a show on the D-Day invasion — recreations of reconnaissance photos along with interviews with survivors — last night. I don’t know if that counts as a “special” or not (my friends and I used to call the History Channel the “World War 2 Channel” — though that’s better than the “Urban Legend Channel” it’s turning into, with all those UFO and Monster Hunt shows).
Anyway, after watching a bit of that show, I was left wondering if we’d have the guts to bring off a similar operation today. Oh wait — I didn’t wonder; I knew — we wouldn’t.
There could have been a world leader speak who was there–Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas Queen, etc.
Sadly, Brown squelched that.