Day by passing day, the Greatest Generation is coming toward its end. D-Day, June 6, 1944, had more than two million Allied personnel on the move across Operation Overlord, and today perhaps a few thousand veterans remain.
In 2021, Harry Parham, believed to be the last Black combat veteran of D-Day — about 2,000 Black troops landed that day — died at 99. Last July, Leon Gautier, the last surviving French commando at the Normandy landings, died. In December, it was Maureen Sweeney, the Irish weather observer whose reports of storms over the Atlantic changed the course of D-Day. In April, it was Bill Gladden, who had been part of the British Sixth Airborne Division’s glider landing on that day and had hoped, at age 100, to survive to return to Normandy, France, for Thursday’s 80th anniversary.
As we mark the final passing of those who won that war, it’s easy to get caught up in gauzy romanticism and lose sight of how the Axis powers unified the free world against them and showed Americans, specifically, what we are capable of.
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.
We can hold on to the past to be reminded of what America, and its allies, were once able to achieve. D-Day was a titanic enterprise, perhaps the largest and most complex single operation in human history — an effort to launch a force of more than a million men across the English Channel on more than 3,000 planes and more than 7,000 ships; to methodically transport entire floating harbors, a herculean secret project known as the Mulberries, as well as 300,500 gallons of drinking water and 800,000 pints of blood plasma, a stockpile carefully segregated, as mandated at the time, between white and Black donors.
The day, fought across five beaches and a roughly 60-mile-wide front, is too vast to comprehend and, in that sense, is best understood at the level of the individual. Take the story of Albert Mominee serving with the 16th Infantry Regiment. He was a slight 28-year-old from Southbridge, Mass., who had cleared the Army’s five-foot height minimum by a mere inch. Two years into his military service, D-Day would already be his third foreign invasion.
He was among the older of the troops at the time; many of the “veteran” sergeants on D-Day were just in their early 20s, while the paratroopers and soldiers they commanded were often still in their teens. The coxswain of LCT-589, Edward Bacalia, known as “Bugs,” was 17 years old. “We owed our skins to Bugs’s seamanship, too, that day,” recalled his crew mate Martin Waarvick. “How about that: 17 years old and piloting a landing craft onto Omaha Beach on D-Day? Not just once, but twice.”
Pvt. Frank Palys, of the 101st Airborne’s 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment — the regiment whose Easy Company was later immortalized in the mini-series “Band of Brothers” — recalled, “I was just a young kid, like the rest of them, trying to free the world from the Nazis.” Or, as Pvt. Ernest Hilberg, of the 18th Infantry Regiment, put it: “I was doing a job that had to be done, that we were going to get rid of the bastard Hitler.”
What that Greatest Generation fought for on D-Day was noble — the first successful cross-Channel invasion from Britain in history, launched not to subjugate or seize but to liberate a continent darkened by authoritarianism. As the supreme allied commander, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, told CBS’s Walter Cronkite, when they returned to Normandy in 1964 for the 20th anniversary, “These men came here — British, and our other allies, Americans — to storm these beaches for one purpose only, not to gain anything for ourselves, not to fulfill any ambitions that America had for conquest, but just to preserve freedom.”
It took another 20 years for the heroism of what would come to be called the Greatest Generation to be appropriately lionized. For decades, few had spoken openly or boastfully of the fights of World War II. Veterans, ripped early from their already hard peacetime childhoods during the Great Depression, had been deposited back in the country after 1945 flush with hard-earned experience, youthful energy and G.I. Bill cash. They settled into aggressively pursuing their daily lives and an American economic boom that created, as politicians often celebrated, the strongest middle class in world history.
In their adulthoods, they held the line against the Communists and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, again defending freedom from authoritarianism. First Sgt. Leonard G. Lomell, of the Second Ranger Battalion, who had climbed the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc in Normandy to disable a threatening German battery, captured the sentiment of many: “I’ve kept a low profile for 50 years, as have most of my men. We didn’t write articles, books, make speeches or publicize the performance of our duties. We knew what each other did and we did our duty like professionals. We weren’t heroes; we were just good Rangers.”
It was President Ronald Reagan’s speech at Pointe du Hoc in 1984, celebrating the exploits of Lomell and his comrades, that began to properly honor and memorialize the fight of World War II. Follow-on work by writers like Stephen Ambrose, Douglas Brinkley and Tom Brokaw changed forever how history will view the sacrifices of both the living and the dead of World War II.
Mr. Brokaw found himself transformed by his journey at the 40th anniversary through the cafes and villages of Normandy, speaking to veterans who had returned to view the beaches they had fought so hard to capture. “I was deeply moved and profoundly grateful for all they had done. I realized that they had been all around me as I was growing up and that I had failed to appreciate what they had been through and what they had accomplished,” Mr. Brokaw wrote in the introduction of his 1998 book, “The Greatest Generation.”
Now it feels almost trite to label World War II the “Good War,” but, in so many ways, for America it was — arguably the last war America fought that ended with a clear victory, waged against an enemy that united America more than it divided us, the last war that clearly pitted good against evil in the pursuit of the ideals of freedom and democracy, which in today’s America feels ever more elusive, unfortunately controversial, and too often negotiable or situational.
America’s role in World War II was far from perfect — recent years have seen an overdue reckoning with the internment of Japanese Americans, to name just one dark chapter. But it was a war we understood and one that gave meaning to those who fought in it. It was a war for an ideal, where our leaders and politicians asked clearly and confidently for sacrifice for noble reasons.
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.
Garrett M. Graff is a journalist, a historian and the author, most recently, of “When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
