D-Day + 70 years

Seventy years ago today, Allied troops waded ashore at five beaches in the Normandy region of France to begin the brutal work of wresting Western Europe from German tyranny. For American soldiers at Omaha Beach, the operation was a bloody shambles, salvaged only by courage, tenacity – and luck.

When I was in college in the early '70s, I came across a book of World War II artwork – propaganda posters, battlefield drawings made by combat artists from both sides, and the like. It included a long essay by James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity, one of the best novels to come out of the war. Jones was in the U.S. Army, stationed in Hawaii, when America entered the war. He heard the explosions from Battleship Row and ran for cover as Japanese planes bombed and strafed Schofield Barracks.

In his essay, he described a visit he made to Omaha Beach decades after the D-Day landings. In the tall coastal grass that covered the bluffs overlooking the beach, he sat where German machine-gun installations had been carefully located to saturate the landing area with machine-gun fire and death.

“It was easy to see what a murderous converging fire could be brought to bear on the beaches from the curving bluff. Especially to an old infantryman. And it was easy to half-close your eyes and imagine what it must have been like. The terror and total confusion, men screaming or sinking silently under the water, tanks sinking as their crews drowned inside, landing craft going up as a direct hit took them, or grating ashore to discharge their live cargo into the already scrambled mess … I sat there … and I fervently thanked God or Whomever that I had not been there.”