Reflections on D-Day

You may ask why, of all places, I chose to go to France for my precious two weeks of leave from Iraq. Certainly, I could have gone home. I could have gone to a lot of places. Of course, I'd been to France before a few years back, but only saw a little bit of Strasbourg and only spent one rainy day in Paris. In a sense, you might think, I was only making up for that.

But the truth is much deeper than that. I live in perpetual awe of the deeds of America's greatest generation - the children of the depression who grew up to be the men and women of an army of freedom. A generation who grew up with nothing, but who gave everything. A generation that fought to restore freedom in a troubled, dark time. Not just for their own sake. Certainly, many generations in human history have fought for the understandably selfish goal of freedom for their own country. Never to this extent, however, have so many fought so bravely for the freedom of complete strangers.

These men, then, are my heroes. They are to me what Achilles and Hector, Diomedes and Odysseus were to the Greeks of Plato's age. They are our knights, but more than that, they are real and human heroes. Not unimpeachable, unreachable myths of greatness, but ordinary men who just did their job. The same old, genial men we pass silently in the grocery store, at the barber's shop or on the highway. Men who did the impossible, but who are impossibly humble. Nothing we do today can compete, though their example can nonetheless make us all better.

France then, was the fulcrum of that time, the crucial moment when these men boldly stepped into harm's way and began the drive to liberate a continent from tyranny. No, it was not Paris that I came to see, though I certainly did that. What brought me to France above all was the place where this great drama truly began. A small strip of coastline on the Western reaches of Europe: Normandy.

In late March, therefore, I visited the battlefield - a series of battlefields, really, stretching over hundreds of square miles - to get a sense of what it was like, and to pay my tribute.

The D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944 began with the dropping of paratroopers behind the German lines. These daring men would isolate the beaches, blocking German reinforcements during the crucial hours of the landing. They were dropped in the dark hours of night in a chaos of confusion that resulted in them being spread across the French countryside. No one arrived where they were supposed to. Many were shot as they came down. Some landed in the ocean or in rivers, and drowned. One of them even landed on the steeple of the old Norman church in Ste. Mere Eglise (See photo below).




But one by one, the paratroopers formed into groups, then companies, and moved towards their objectives. Delayed, but not daunted, by mid-morning of the next day they had seized the key points they were tasked to take and doggedly held their ground as the landings unfolded behind them.

A dozen miles away, the dawn broke to a sight unseen before or since in World History: an invasion fleet of nearly 6,000 ships of all sizes, from the largest battleships to cruisers, to destroyers, transports and small landing craft carrying a dozen men. The German gunners on the beaches, who had survived a powerful - but ineffective raid by hundreds of bombers, prepared themselves. This, their general, Erwin Rommel had told them, would be the Longest Day.



In a chain of bunkers, concrete forts and batteries, they waited. As the first of the landing craft approached the shores, the great batteries, such as the one above, opened fire - and would continue to do so until they were silenced by Naval gunfire, tanks, or infantrymen. As the landing craft drew nearer to the shoreline, German small guns and machine guns - placed in pillboxes at angles to the beach and thus protected from naval shelling - prepared to meet the onslaught with as much death as their operators could deal out.

One of the most dangerous batteries, Allied experts believed, was a series of positions that sat between two of the key beaches. The Pointe du Hoc was a position that could fire on all of the beaches and on the ships in the harbor as well. But despite weeks of bombardment, none of its massive concrete bunkers had even been cracked. Only an assault by determined men could get in and do the job, in brutal, close combat.

But Pointe du Hoc was not an easy target. Perched above a cliff, it could only be reached by land from the rear or by sea by an impossible climb up the 200-foot cliffs under fire. The man who volunteered to lead this impossible mission was the commander of a Ranger battalion, James Earl Rudder, a graduate of Texas A&M University (who would one day return to be the school's president). Defying all predictions, he led his men up the cliff, and in hard combat that sometimes involved troops exchanging grenades with enemy positions only feet away, won the hill. When it was discovered that the dreaded guns were not in fact there, Rudder's men, undaunted, pushed inland despite their small numbers and found the guns, concealed in a secondary position. They quickly destroyed them, thus neutralizing this threat to the beachhead. (Photo: myself at Pointe du Hoc. The craters behind me are the results of the allied aerial bombardment 64 years ago).

Back down at the beaches, the small, flat-bottomed landing craft pushed for the shoreline. There they faced a landscape of ingenious traps set by their German foe to destroy them. Huge logs which were placed below the waterline and topped with mines. Asterisk-shaped steal beams that could tear the bottom out of a boat and send its crew to their deaths. Concrete pyramids topped with mines and large iron gates that could scuttle the craft or trap boats on shore, preventing them from returning for a second trip (see below.

To avoid these dangers, the allies chose to land at low tide - not the high tide that had always been made in invasions past. But there was a cost to this decision, for low tide would dramatically increase the distance that the troops would have to advance, under fire, before the final assault on the German lines on the ridges overlooking the beaches.

(Photo: Omaha Beach - the most bloody spot on D-Day, where thousands of Americans died in the first waves. The houses had been leveled by the Germans and the ridges bristled with barbed wire, machine gun nests and mine fields.)

The landing craft hit the beach and disgorged their cargo of men. Many were struck down in the first moments. Many more were trapped in boats rent asunder with shell fire. The first two waves were ineffective, with barely a handful of soldiers making it across the vast beach, where they crouched in impotence behind a small rock-strewn pile known as a shingle, which provided minimal protection.

This is Omaha Beach close to low tide - how it looked the day allied forces landed. The storm barrier on the left is roughly the spot where the shingle was. American soldiers who made it through the wall of steel across this beach were pinned down in wave after wave there. But soon the tide would turn. Smaller ships out to sea - destroyers - closed the gap and engaged the batteries. Soldiers began peppering the machine gun nests with fire. Soon, the number of troops on the beach began to grow, until like the paratroopers inland, they formed squads and companies and began to assault the German positions.

One by one, the German positions fell silent. But not all. Huge concrete walls blocked all the beach obstacles, and engineers moved forward to blow them up. Late in the morning, troops began climbing the ridgeline.

By the end of the first day, a small toe hold had been made on the soil of France. Soon, from bloody Omaha, and from Utah Beach, Gold, Sword and Juno, the Allies - Americans, British, Canadians, Free French and others - began moving into the countryside. As they moved forward, more men and equipment flowed to the beaches. The paratroopers and the soldiers from the first waves doggedly blocked German counter-attacks as the buildup of forces grew in the next few days.

Before he had launched the most ambitious military attack of all time, General Dwight D. Eisenhower had written a letter. In it, he stated that he regretted that the invasion had failed, and that he had been forced to pull the troops back. The fault for the failure, he said, was entirely his. Late on the afternoon of June 6, Eisenhower finally breathed a sigh of relief. The message would never be sent. D-Day was a success.

The story did not stop there. Over the next few months, the Western Allies pushed through France and liberated Paris, then moved on to Germany. On the eastern front, the Soviet Union launched a major offensive and began the march to Berlin. In the next year, tens of thousands of villages, hundreds of cities and dozens of countries would be liberated. The war would gain new meaning for its soldiers as they began to liberate the heinous Nazi concentration camps.

But it had come at a price. For America, it was a steep downpayment indeed. Within the first two days of landing on the soil of France, more American soldiers were killed than have been killed in five years in Iraq. And the population of America in 1944 was nearly half of what it is today.


These soldiers, and many others who fought for our country lie, in dozens of military cemeteries across the world, as well as in the hometowns where they grew up, went fishing, played baseball and met their sweathearts. But the most moving, and most hallowed of resting places is where they lie together. On a bluff overlooking Omaha Beach is a cemetery. Row after row of white crosses - and the occasional Star of David - stand side by side, as if the dead are enjoying one last formation together.

If you've seen the movie "Saving Private Ryan" you know the place I'm talking about. Moving as these pictures may be, there is nothing quite like the feeling of being there. Seeing the names. Reading the dates of birth, and the all-too repetitive dates of death. Doing the math. 18 years old. 22. 45. From Pennsylvania, Georgia, California. And every one of the crosses is perfectly aligned, facing westward.

Westward to home.

Having finally visited these vast outdoor shrines to heroism, I felt good. Over the course of three days, I had trudged up the hillsides, climbed up the hedgerows and slowly, breathlessly took in the beaches, so peaceful today. I didn't want to live in the past, but just reflect and appreciate what the men of the past have done to build the world that we all enjoy. What these men - our grandfathers and our neighbors - did to keep us free and to free millions of the oppressed.

As I stood on Utah beach in the bitter chill, wearing my "Camp Victory South - Iraq" baseball cap and watching the waves crash in, all these thoughts came to my mind. As I started back, I noticed footprints in the sand. My own. Although I had brought civilian clothes on my trip, I had no proper hiking shoes except my combat boots.

It was these, then, which had left a print. The same boots which had carried me in my journey from the training fields of Wisconsin to the deserts of Kuwait to the rocky sand - and marble palaces - of Iraq. The irony made me smile, and I snapped a picture.

The boots that had trod across this very beach 64 years ago are boots that I don't feel I could ever fill myself. But something, some warm feeling of kinship passed through my mind at that moment. For myself, and all those who serve with me today, are part of a long, unbroken tradition of service. A tradition that was already ancient on that cloudy, heartbreaking day in 1944, and which continues on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and anywhere in the world where Americans stand guard. It is an honor beyond description to count myself a part of that tradition. For myself, and my generation, we can only hope that what we do in our lives uphods it as well as those men who crossed this very beach so many years ago.

That is the debt we owe, and the challenge we embrace.