Europe and the US commemorate D-Day (and suddenly the war no longer seems so remote)

So far away in time, D-Day, and so close at the same time. Here, on the beaches of Normandy, the past is something almost physical: the same fine sand, the changing tides, the sky, now blue, now rainy, and the wind. But the past does not allow itself to be trapped. How can we imagine what happened in this precise place that morning of June 6, 1944?

80 years have passed since, on June 6, 1944, 130,000 soldiers, mostly North American and British, landed on the coast and contributed, along with the effort of the Red Army on the Eastern Front, to liberate Europe from Nazi Germany. There are few survivors left. Memory is extinguished. The landing in Normandy belongs to history books and movies.

And yet, rarely has that past been so present. As if the images of the battles on Omaha Beach and the other sandbanks – the fire, the blood, the ruins and the cemeteries – were no longer something as remote and exotic as they were 10, 20 or 30 years ago. With Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, war – again ruins and soldiers’ cemeteries, fire and blood again – has returned to Europe.

—My dad never told us about what happened that day.

The speaker is María Palacios and she tells a story that she only knew as an adult. Her father’s name was Alfredo Palacios and he said little about what happened to him in this precise place where María is now. In addition to relatives of the D-Day soldiers, local authorities and American and French military commanders have come. Hymns are sung, speeches are given. They have just inaugurated a monument to the soldiers of the Navy, the US Navy. Those who landed on Omaha Beach; the predecessors of the Navy Seals who killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011.

This is Omaha, the best known of the Norman beaches, “dominated by promontories covered by halophilic plants [que] “It became a much deadlier target than the Allies had expected,” says historian Antony Beevor in his monumental The Second World War. “The first wave of invaders suffered many casualties, victims of enemy machine gun fire and light artillery, which riddled the landing craft as soon as they descended the ramps.” On D-Day, 4,414 Allied soldiers died and between 4,000 and 9,000 Germans were killed, wounded or missing, according to an estimate by the Associated Press agency.

María Palacios has come from California with her family to Omaha Beach, where her father, Alfredo, lost his left arm.

—He was at the foot of the ravine, weak and tired.

He was 26 years old, of Mexican origin. He was finishing his engineering studies when he enlisted in the Navy. June 6, 1944 was short-lived for him: wounded, he was evacuated to the other bank of the English Channel. Upon returning to the United States he met María’s mother and worked as an engineer in the California State Department of Inspections. He inspected buildings, factories, bridges. He remembers his daughter who was also in charge of the Golden Gate in San Francisco: “She would climb on the bridge, without her arm.”

Alfredo Palacios died in 2015, at the age of 95. “He wanted to reach 100,” sighs his daughter. “I would have liked to be here with him.”

There are fewer and fewer veterans of the longest day. “There isn’t a single one left,” one of them said in 2014, living proof that some did remain. His name was Walter Heline, and he received EL PAÍS in his modest house on the outskirts of Baltimore. He had enlisted when he was 19 years old. He had never seen combat before setting foot on Omaha Beach. He said that, unlike his country’s wars in this century—Iraq and Afghanistan—the soldiers then knew why they were fighting. “Not now,” he lamented a decade ago, when Russia had begun its first invasion of Ukraine and the old European order was beginning to falter. Six years later, in May 2020, the newspaper Baltimore Sun broke the news: “Walter W. Heline, an Army Ranger with the 29th Division, has died on Omaha Beach on D-Day.”

These days, on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of D-Day, some of the last survivors of this heroic and dwindling community—the greatest generation– they are called in their country, the generation of the best, the greatest, the one that gave the United States what was perhaps its last definitive and glorious military victory – will travel to Normandy. They are all around 100, and it is likely that by the 90th anniversary there will be only a handful left. On Thursday the 6th, they will participate in the ceremonies alongside the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and his American counterparts, Joe Biden, and Ukrainian counterparts, Volodymyr Zelensky. Russia has not been invited.

—Is this the last time?

Dominique Moïsi, essayist, author of The geopolitics of emotion and Norman by adoption, this question is asked in a double sense. The first sense refers to the age of the veterans: “Will this be the last time in its biological meaning?” The second, to the dangers that threaten the alliance between the United States and Europe, an alliance whose founding hour—its culminating hour—was D-Day. And here the question refers to the upcoming US elections: “Will Europe still be interested in to America if Donald Trump is elected president in November?”

Moïsi has attended all the commemorations for 40 years, and there has always been a topical background, from the Cold War in 1984 to the annexation of Crimea in 2014, passing through the Balkan and Iraq wars. But never more than now, he says: “The war has returned to Europe, and the Colleville-sur-mer cemetery with the graves of the soldiers who fell for freedom evokes the cemeteries in Ukraine with the soldiers who fell not only for the defense of his country, but for the defense of freedom.”

The ceremony is held three days before the European elections and with a host—Macron—who has warned: “Our Europe can die.” And five months before a US election that can be won by Trump, the former president and candidate who threatens to leave Europeans helpless in the face of the Russian threat. It is celebrated—if celebrating is the exact word—with an open war in the Middle East and at decisive moments for Ukraine, due to the Russian offensive and the unknowns about the effectiveness of Western aid and its viability if Trump wins.

“For the first time, the past evokes the present and threatens to prefigure the future,” says Moïsi. “For now the only young people to die for the cause of freedom are Ukrainians. What would happen tomorrow if the conflict widened?”

Captain Rick Woolard, former navy seal and Vietnam veteran, has come to Omaha Beach to inaugurate the monument for his predecessors, and after a brief speech he asks: “What they did then, could we do now?” When asked to respond, he says, “I don’t have the answer. “I just hope we don’t have to find out.” He refers to the decade of the 1930s, that of totalitarianism and the preparations for World War II: “We are in 1938, everyone fears that something will happen, let’s hope not, but the possibility is there. 30 years ago the USSR collapsed and we thought
there would be peace, love and happiness forever, and here we are now.”

“Where do we find people willing to risk everything, to give everything for something greater?” says Rear Admiral Keith B. Davids, commander of the US Navy’s special forces, looking out over the beach. This inspires us today.”

This is, for many, a sacred place, and a place of pilgrimage. Like the Burridge family, from Chicago, who gathers at the grave of Wiliam Bechter, a pilot who was shot down in July 1943 further north, near the border with Belgium. Bechter was the uncle of a family friend. He was 22 years old.

After the ceremony, in which they planted a flag from the United States and others from France, they sent the photo to their friend, who lives in Denver. “Incredible!” He responded immediately. Richard, the father of the family, is moved among the thousands of crosses and the sea: “We have come to honor what these boys did to change the course of history and allow us all to have a freer life.”

You have to drive a few kilometers inland, to Caen or Saint-Lô, to discover an urban landscape that is repeated in this part of France: that of post-war fascist architecture, cities bombed by the allies in the months before D-Day and in the days after. A total of 60,000 civilians died, according to the calculations of historian Stephen A. Bourque, author of Beyond the beach. The allied war against France (Beyond the beach. The allied war against France). Saint-Lô, where Macron participates in a ceremony on Wednesday, was 90% destroyed: a field of ruins.

Memories overlap in Normandy. And this, the bombing of the civilian population, is one of the most complex, because those who bombed were the liberators. “A war crime,” according to historian Bourque.

Back to the beaches, stopping at the farm of Paulette and Bernard Petit, who were children on D-Day, and have only words of gratitude for the United States soldiers who liberated them. Another memory.

Paulette remembers the morning of June 1944. She was nine years old. They lived 800 meters from the beach. She hid with her family in a ditch. “It was then,” she says, “when we started hearing a huge, huge, huge noise… The soldiers were screaming. My dad told me: ‘They fight with knives.’ The next day she saw convoys passing by and someone said: “That’s it, they have arrived.” “A soldier gave us chocolates and cigarettes,” she explains. “I smoked a cigarette and got sick. “I never smoked again.”

-Were you at any time afraid those days?

―At nine years old you are not afraid. You can’t die at that age.

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