Why D-Day Matters (and some photos from visiting Normandy)

The fight for democracy never ends

Today in Normandy world leaders—including President Biden—are gathering and honoring the last of the Greatest Generation veterans who launched the D-Day invasion eight decades ago.

I’ve obviously spent a lot of the last year reflecting on what and why D-Day matters, as I’ve pored over thousands of first-person accounts of the fighting that day while compiling WHEN THE SEA CAME ALIVE.

Earlier this week, I wrote a bit about that meaning in an oped in the NYT:

Every serviceman headed to Normandy was handed a “Pocket Guide to France” that read, in part: “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.”

This election year it is worth asking what we are doing with the legacy that the Greatest Generation defended and bequeathed to us. American freedom has always been imperfect — a nation seeking, generation after generation, to be better, more equal, more inclusive and still more free. It is a story of hard-fought rights and bloodily defended liberties that each generation of Americans has handed down to the next, a vision for a future in which each successive generation will improve upon the past.

We now face the very real question of whether America will embrace a vision of a country less free and less democratic, more divided and more unequal. It would be a step backward unlike almost anything else in American history.

…

Across the next few months we will be hearing a lot of argument about what America is and what it isn’t. 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.

It feels hard and fraught to see these images beaming back from France today, as Biden greets the small number of mostly wheelchair-bound 100-year-old veterans, intermixed with news headlines about Donald Trump promising retribution on prosecutors if he’s reelected this fall. Just about sixty of those veterans traveled to Normandy, part of the ever-dwindling number of World War II survivors still with us. (One Canadian D-Day veteran died just days before leaving for the French commemorations and the UK estimates there are just *six* D-Day veterans left alive in Britain.)

I wanted to share today some photos from my own research visit to Normandy last fall. I spent a week in Normandy, with my friend Jon Murad, exploring the battlefields with Paul “Woody” Woodadge, who has dedicated three decades to understanding the fight for Normandy, from D-Day through the campaign’s conclusion 77 days later at the Falaise Gap. As I say in the book acknowledgements, “I have never met anyone anywhere who knew as much about a single subject as he does about the invasion and battle of Normandy. (“Every footstep here is a life lost,” he said, as we paced 110 steps up Juno beach, where the Queen's Own Rifles came ashore.) We hiked in hedgerows, down one beach draw and up another, crouched in German Tobruks and bunkers, and journeyed to the old mill site near the Chateau de Bernaville where General Wilhelm Falley was killed after his staff car came under attack by paratroopers, the marks of the crash still visible 79 years later on the mill wall.”

Few experiences compared in sheer emotional weight and power to walking Omaha Beach at low tide, seeing it just as the assault waves would have as they landed and imagined—looking up at the vast sand reaches of the beach—what it must have been like to see how far away safety was that morning. Here’s how the sandy crescent would have looked to a German defender at the eastern end of the beach:

The title WHEN THE SEA CAME ALIVE comes actually from a German defender who woke up to this view, but filled to the horizon with allied ships and landing craft. Just imagine that view and that shock.

With Woody’s dramatic timing, we stood, too, in the town square of Sainte-Mère-Église as the church bells tolled noon, imagining how their incessant bonging would have resonated amongst the fire of that June evening so long ago:

And while most visitors stick to the famous official cemeteries, we also walked a lot of smaller churchyards, when D-Day’s history is forever remembered too. One particularly striking visit was the churchyard of L’église Notre-Dame de Ranville, where these uneven rows of tombstones in the photos below mark where the first D-Day graves were dug even before dawn on the morning of June 6, 1944—paratroopers who died in that original assault hours before the landing itself:

The week with Woody completely altered my understanding of D-Day and the book that followed. As I wrote in the book, “After months of studying D-Day from afar—focused often on the big decisions of the Ikes and Montys of the day—Woody taught me to see the fight as individual soldiers did, to understand D-Day less as one big fight or even as five separate beaches, but as 167,000 individual experiences and battles, to look at the land where Jimmie Monteith bravely held a vital draw off Omaha Beach, to see the trees where paratroopers hung up and died at the hands of German tormentors, to see the view from the resistance nests where German machine-gunners looked out, surprised, at the giant invasion fleet, to marvel at the skill of Jim Wallwork to land his glider in the tiny space astride Pegasus Bridge, and to stare at the small, unassuming stone bridge at La Fière where so many died.”

Here’s that Omaha Beach exit, looking down at the beach. Imagine the fight it took to get up this, just one of five exits off the beach:

You can still see the imprint of D-Day everywhere in Normandy. The British beaches, for instance, backed up against urban areas, and here’s a curb, still damaged by a British tank tread 79 years later:

And, finally, a photo about the final chapter of WHEN THE SEA CAME ALIVE, that battle for what was known as La Fière causeway. This tiny bridge, here, was the scene of some of the heaviest fighting of all of D-Day—it represented just one of two crossings west over the Merderet River that, alternatively the Germans could use to rush reinforcements in and crush the landings at Utah or that the Americans could use to break out of their beachhead and launch towards the key port of Cherbourg.

US Army historian S. L. A. Marshall, who would write more than 30 books on US military history and was present himself in the Normandy invasion, later declared that the fight for the causeway not just as “the fiercest battle in the European war,” but “probably the bloodiest small unit struggle in the experience of American arms.” It was, too, an opportunity for true bravery; participants of the four-day battle would earn eighteen Distinguished Service Crosses and two Medals of Honor.

Just look at that bridge and imagine the heroism of the four paratroopers, armed with bazookas, who held off an entire assault by German tanks and infantry. As I quote Pvt. Marcus Heim in the book, “Why we were not injured or killed only the good Lord knows.”

Why indeed?

I hope today you’ll take some time to reflect on D-Day, its courage, and its lessons for today.

GMG

PS: If you’re curious, here’s my talk about the book at the Roosevelt House in New York City on Tuesday, with fellow D-Day historian Craig Symonds. He was a very smart interviewer and asked almost exclusively questions that threw me off my well-rehearsed talking points—and you’ll see several times my voice broke with emotion: