This might be the last significant D-Day anniversary to involve living veterans. But it’s the first to be overshadowed by a European territorial war.
| In the French village of Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, on the Normandy coast, almost every household seems to possess an American flag. And on June 6, the Stars and Stripes were fluttering alongside the FrenchThe village sits right behind Omaha Beach, part of the sandy, 35-kilometre coastal strip that in World War II hosted the largest amphibious and airborne assault in military history, as the Allies sought to liberate occupied France and defeat the Nazis on Germany’s western front.
The cavalcade’s destination was a rigged-up open-air auditorium on Omaha Beach. French President Emmanuel Macron was hosting a party for a full slate of NATO leaders, and dozens of nonagenarian, even centenarian, D-Day veterans. It was a party with a purpose: to honour the feats of heroism, and remember what it was all for.Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer will have seen this kind of thing before – probably every five years, in fact. But something was different this year.
The moment was spontaneous, but it symbolised exactly what US President Joe Biden and Macron had been hoping to achieve with this D-Day commemoration: yoking the storied, uncontested past to the pressing, polarising problems of the present.“We were more afraid of letting the side down than we were of the actual battle that went on”After all, D-Day was, fundamentally, a moment when the West came together, without qualms for the price to be paid, to drive back an authoritarian aggressor in Europe.
On D-Day, 4500 lost their lives and 10,000 were injured. By the time Paris was liberated a little over two months later, 37,000 allied ground troops and 16,000 air servicemen were dead, and another 150,000 wounded or missing.In recent interviews, the few surviving British veterans tell a story not so much of heroism, but of doing their job. And of almost not knowing what the fighting would be like.
US President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden greet American World War II veterans at D-Day commemorations in Normandy.The US is now more equivocal about its leadership role, and the price it is willing to pay to enforce a pax Americana. Donald Trump and many Republicans are of an isolationist bent, and even Biden has his struggles with multilateralism, particularly on trade.
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