This Great And Noble Undertaking

I first wrote this piece five years ago. I’ve updated it, bit by bit, on successive D-Day anniversaries. I’m reprising it today:

———-

It was sixty-seven years ago today that the Allies started taking Western Europe back from the Nazis.

The first, inevitable step was to get past the Westwall – perhaps the most immense set of fortifications ever built, with the intention of making the beaches from Denmark to the Spanish border a bloodbath for any troops trying to cross the beaches.

In places, it worked:

In some places, the troops had to overcome the near-impossible:

And yet by the end of the day, nine allied divisions were ashore, a toehold for a bridgehead that would eventually expand, ten months later, across Western Europe.

There were troops from the US, of course, on the two western beaches…

…and farther east, beaches with Brits…

…and Scots…

And in the middle, linking the two and meeting the worst resistance other than Omaha, the Canadians:

Troops from the Canadian Third Division coming ashore at Juno Beach – where the ferocity and difficulty of the fighting was exceeded only by Omaha Beach.

…along with troops-in-exile from elsewhere in occupied Europe; French commandos – some of whom had spent four years in exile, and who spent the next year belying the notion that the French were cowards…:

…and Norwegians, who’d been without a homeland for four years…

HNoMS Svenner – sunk by German gunfire off Sword Beach.

…and Poles, who’d been in exile for five years and would, in some cases, remain there for forty-five more:

The world may see nothing like it again.

So – thank a D-Day veteran.

Here’s President Reagan’s address to the survivors of the US 2nd Ranger Battalion, thirty years ago today…:

…who at this time seventy years ago, French Time, were still a day away from being relieved by the troops coming in from Omaha Beach.

Posted

June 6, 2014

History And Its Making

Mitch Berg

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8 responses to “This Great And Noble Undertaking”

swiftee

June 6, 2014

We had a D-Day cake in the office this morning.
Night Writer

June 6, 2014

Here’s a poem I wrote several years ago that I always ran on this day on my old blog. Since that is all but extinct, I’ll throw it in here:

June 6
I’ve felt like this before. The nausea,
simultaneously sweating and shivering,
knowing that something was about to happen
and it wouldn’t be good.
Then it was being crammed into the landing craft,
Pressing toward Omaha Beach,
held in place by the shoulders of the men on either side of me,
eyes fixed on the door at the front,
with death on the other side as the bullets hissed.
Now it’s more than sixty years later
and the tubes and wires
hold me in place as the machines hiss
as I stare at the door with death on the other side.
Maybe this time, too, I’ll be lucky.

Then we advanced like a wave, and death took us
by the handfuls;
Bombs, machine guns, artillery shells leaving
sudden gaps in the line,
friendships and debts disappearing in an instant,
but we still advanced from hedge to hill, from farm to city.
Storming a farm house we found
the German kid with a couple of bullets
(maybe mine)
in him, clutching a religious medallion and
praying “Mein Gott, mein Gott”
as he bled out.
My God.
My God, too.
I knelt and his lips moved as he looked at me,
I put my hand on the side of his face,
“God, have mercy on him,” I prayed as his
face became peaceful and the light left with his blood.
“God, have mercy on us all.”

At reunions we’d regroup and note
the new gaps in the line;
death now a sniper as we fall one by one
and just as inevitably.
Does He see our faces in the scope
as He lines up the head shot,
or only the meat as he selects
heart, lungs, marrow?
Then we advanced because we had to,
We had to win
We had to make our losses mean something.
We thought we had won, at the end,
but it was only the war and not the battle
and the lives were just a down-payment
on peace and breathing room
until the enemy returns
with installments paid in different ways
in the days and nights to come.
Sometimes in later years
when I felt the moistness of my wife
I would suddenly think of Steinie,
of pushing his guts back inside him
after he was burst by the 88.
Those were the nights, then,
when I would sit up at the kitchen table, smoking
until you kids came in for breakfast,
keeping watch, remembering the faces,
wondering how many others might also be sitting up
that night, remembering the same faces.
I don’t wonder so much anymore.

Meanwhile, the fat sales director,
who sat out the war In England
in the Quartermaster corps, would say,
“Boys, we’ve got to take that hill” and
we would take that hill, fill that quota,
and make another payment on the Dream
because we had seen Evil and had our fill
and thought it was finished and that
the world had been reborn shiny and new.
Surely it had to have been,
given the cost;
surely evil had to have been driven away,
and we came back to build a new world
for you our children,
a world where you would never have to
face what we faced;
see what we saw,
do what we had done.
We were naive, of course,
but don’t blame us
for wanting it to be so.

Did we do wrong, my children?
Thinking no one would dare open that door again,
did we neglect to prepare you,
to give you valuable perspective?
You´ve seen the pictures,
And heard the words,
but you can´t know the smell
or the taste,
of walking into that concentration camp,
so your Hitlers are effigies and
Nazis are bogeymen,
mere cursing but not a curse.
I´m sorry, I´m sorry, I´m sorry.
There’s much I would have you know
things I should have said and
lessons you’ll have to learn on your own.

I don’t know why I’ve lived so long
when so many died around me,
unless it’s because something of their
unused futures was somehow transferred to me
in the spray of their blood.
I’ve tried to use it well.
May you do the same.
Scott Hughes

June 6, 2014

Thank you very much for sharing that Night Writer !!!
Mitch Berg

June 6, 2014

NW,

Share that poem all you want.
golfdoc50

June 6, 2014

Dude, that was like 70 years ago. (Sarcasm). Mitch, your pieces on the history of WW II are priceless.
Joe

June 8, 2014

Just had some guests over to share dinner. When we retired to my room of remembrances to see my stuff, I showed them my late father’s WWII duffle bag and the few mementos he brought back. He never made a big deal over the stuff, it just happened. No greater affect on him than on his 11 siblings (or spouses) who also dealt that stuff over there. Heck, as kids we played with all the bring-backs.

My Dad and uncles, as well as my Mom and aunts who supported them and their children back home during that time, are now gone. May God give us half the strength they had …
Night Writer

June 9, 2014

Thank you for your comments, Scott and Mitch. I’m not sure where that poem came from; my grandparents worked for Curtis-Wright during the war and my parents were too young to be involved, but I still grew up with a respect and awe for what had been accomplished. When the idea of the poem came to me, I think it took all of 30 minutes to write.

As to what Joe wrote, I wrote a later essay entitled, “The Greatest Degeneration?” that offered that perhaps our current generations, if pressed, could accompllish something similar. It read, in part:

Today it is worthwhile to celebrate and honor their mindset to do what had to be done, but in doing so perhaps we sell short our own capacity to do the same. Given the opportunity, I think that past generation — faced with economic collapse and a global thirst for totalitarianism — would have just as soon let that cup pass them by. That option, of course, was not granted them and they knew it. Perhaps the greatest difference between their generation and ours is that today we think such a choice exists.

They grew up with cash on the barrelhead, “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” mantras; they had witnessed what financial speculation and excess led to. The only thing they deferred was gratification as they scrounged to support their families or slogged toward Germany, all to the tune of “When the Lights Go On Again All Over the World.” Yet the generation that couldn’t say “No” to its fate gave birth to the generation that apparently can’t say “No” to anything.

You can’t blame our forbears for having suffered much and desiring that their children not know the fear, hunger and torment that they endured. Out of that love, perhaps, it was natural to have a vision of raising up a generation that would know no limits…and one, unfortunately, that also knows no “No.” Our generation defers no gratification, only the payments, and won’t the next generation be thankful?

To be honest, the Greatest Generation also voted repeatedly for the New Deal, the ancestor of today’s stimulus package — yet they were likely the first ones to come up with the analogy that’s going around today of trying to increase the amount of water in a swimming pool by hauling buckets from the deep end and pouring them into the shallow end! They were human, capable of taking what looks like an easy way out but also quite capable, when pressed, to digging deep within themselves to persevere through hardship and work for something better and bigger than themselves.

We, too, are human and even with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement we are capable of the same inner reserves and faith. Like our parents and grandparents, we may not willingly seek out adversity, but we shouldn’t run from it either. We can meet it, defeat it, and give the next generations stories to tell rather than debts to pay.

If only we get the chance.
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