D-Day and Our Debt to the Greatest Generation

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Today, June 6th, marks of course the 81st anniversary of the D-Day invasion, one of the most noble causes humans have ever fought. My D-Day oral history, WHEN THE SEA CAME ALIVE, is out in paperback this week, and I hope you’ll pick it up if you haven’t already. The book brings together the voices of about 700 participants in that titanic struggle — German, French, American, British, Canadian, and more — to tell the story of Operation Overlord in the eyes of those who lived it first-hand. 

When the book came out last year, I highlighted one of my favorite “characters” in the book: Waverly Woodson, Jr., the Black medic who heroically treated wounded on Omaha Beach for 30 hours, despite being wounded himself, only to have the racist politics of the time deny him the Medal of Honor — a wrong partly (and finally!) righted 80 years later when he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. 

Beyond his family and a few others, Woodson’s story had been mostly buried for decades until Linda Hervieux’s book FORGOTTEN, which profiled Woodson’s 320th Anti-Aircraft Barrage Balloon Battalion, the sole Black combat unit to land on D-Day, a slice of the about 2,000 Black personnel who participated in a day that day whose history and mythology since has been largely white and male.

The belated recognition of Woodson’s bravery is to me a valuable lesson in one of the best aspects of history: It gets bigger with time, more inclusive, wider, more nuanced, complicated, and more textured.

It doesn’t take anything from anyone in history to note and remark upon, note, and celebrate the lives of others. Saying that Waverly Woodson was brave and deserves recognition does not make the actions of any other soldier, sailor, airmen, marine, or coast-guardsmen at D-Day or in World War II beyond.

To me, that ever-better approach to America is literally the central promise of the United States — we have always been an imperfect nation but one that strives to be better with each passing generation. We are a country that gets (figuratively) bigger with every generation — more inclusive and more equal. History and scholarship changes and enlarges alongside the rest of our country. 

We are, of course, at this moment watching a much darker moment — history is, in many ways, getting smaller under the Trump administration. After a generation where we’ve worked as a nation to build a more accurate and representative look at history, the Trump administration is hell-bent on “re-whitening history” and removing anyone who seeks to embrace the accurate portrayal of diversity in our past.

We are in a national civil war over our own history.

In one chapter that future generations will look particularly darkly on, one among all too many, the Naval Academy this spring removed 381 books from its library, including Maya Angelou’s I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS and even books on the Holocaust. Nothing better highlights of the irony of this moment than this line from the New York Times: “THE BELL CURVE, which argues that Black men and women are genetically less intelligent than white people, is still there. But a critique of the book was pulled.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — precisely the inexperienced and unqualified “DEI hire” that he pretends to rail against — had the Pentagon go on a diversity jihad this spring that removed write-ups of baseball hero Jackie Robinson, the Tuskegee Airmen, and other women and people of color who have braved served in the past — targeting them for removal simply because of their gender or the color of their skin.

Now, in his latest national insult, Hegseth has evidently used June’s Pride Month as a moment to attempt to strip the name of Harvey Milk from a naval ship. Milk was one of the first openly gay politicians in the country — a civil rights icon who was assassinated while on the San Francisco board of supervisors in 1978. 

The USNS Harvey Milk is one of what are known as the John Lewis-class oilers, ships that also include not just the John Lewis but USNS Thurgood Marshall, USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and USNS Harriet Tubman. Hegseth evidently is coming for all of them.

Including Harvey Milk’s story in military history represented another belated and overdue acknowledgement of our imperfect past. Milk, a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy, left the service when he faced a 1954 court martial for participating in a “homosexual act,” forced out because he couldn’t be his full self in the military.

Today, it is an insult not just to Milk and the other John Lewis-ship namesakes but to everyone who fought for the United States across the last 250 years. San Francisco’s own former House speaker Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi told CBS News, “The reported decision by the Trump Administration to change the names of the USNS Harvey Milk and other ships in the John Lewis-class is a shameful, vindictive erasure of those who fought to break down barriers for all to chase the American Dream.”

Indeed.

We owe so much to that Greatest Generation, but most of all I believe we owe it to them to carry forward the torch of freedom and liberty that they fought and died for in Europe, Africa, the Pacific, and beyond. And that includes living the values they defended here at home.

The men (and women!) who fought in World War II were as diverse as America was — and while it’s impossible to compare heroism, it’s worth nothing that many of the bravest stories we’ve found in the years since have been from units marginalized at home: Not just Waverly Woodson, but the Navajo Code Talkers or the Japanese-Americans soldiers of the 100th Infantry Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team, who earned one wartime Medal of Honor, 53 Distinguished Service Crosses, 9,486 Purple Hearts and seven Presidential Unit Citations, the nation's top award for combat units. For all the deserved attention to the Band of Brothers of Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, there are amazing stories to be had in the Chicano soldiers of another Easy Company, 2nd Battalion of the 141st Infantry Division.

These minorities — and more! — went off to fight abroad for democracy despite living in a country that had failed them with its most basic creed — that all men are created equal.

As I quote Pfc. Timuel D. Black, of the 308th Quartermaster Battalion, 1st Division, “When I was asked how can you be fighting and so loyal to a country that mistreats you by someone else, you know, French or German or whatever. I would quickly respond, ‘That is none of your business. I am an American. We will straighten that out, but that is none of your business.’”

Or, to put it more bluntly, there was an anonymous Black soldier writing in November 1943 from Britain: “I am an American Negro, doing my part for the American government to make the world safe for a democracy I have never known.”

They sailed for and parachuted into Normandy 81 years ago on June 6, 1944, to free a continent from fascism and authoritarianism. They were fighting fascism abroad to keep it from arriving on our shores. Every American serviceman headed to Normandy received a “Pocket Guide to France” that advised: “We democracies aren’t just doing favors in fighting for each other when history gets tough. We’re all in the same boat. Take a look around you as you move into France and you’ll see what the Nazis do to a democracy.”

Today, a fascist movement is attempting to take over our country again — and one of their first moves is trying to take away and rewrite our history, in part by firing the historians who watch over that our nation’s official history is unbiased and honest. 

Last year, for the 80^th anniversary, I wrote a piece in the New York Times examining our debt to that Greatest Generation. I noted that we were in the midst of a heated national conversation about what America is and what it isn’t, and wrote, “There’s a simpler answer to that question than many would like to admit: What we’ll fight for is who we are. And, as we look ahead, we must decide if we’re still as willing today to fight for democracy as the generation who stormed Normandy was 80 years ago.”

Today and in the months ahead, I hope we’re as ready to fight as hard for our nation’s past as we are its future.

GMG

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