Sword, Gold, Juno, Omaha, Utah.
Today, these five nouns carry little meaning. When I was in elementary school, however, at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, almost any schoolchild, presented with these nouns and questioned what they had in common, could, without too much help, recite them as the names of the Normandy D-Day invasion Beaches.
Now, as we come upon the 75th anniversary of the June 6, 1944 landings, the memories of Operation Overlord and its related Operation Neptune have faded into a grayscale past. The men (pace ladies, there were no women on the front lines in Normandy on D-Day, save for those of the French Résistance) of that Greatest Generation who stormed ashore that day to open up a new front against the Nazis are passing into eternity at the rate of something like 1200 a day. Soon we shall see their like no more.
When I was a boy, taking those vocabulary quizzes where we were called upon to tell the teacher what Sword, Gold, Juno, Omaha, and Utah had in common, our neighborhood was full of men and women, many of them still in their vigorous 50s, as I am today, who had fought in World War II. Because my neighborhood was part of Hollywood, and because many of my neighbors were part of the Entertainment Industry (and one always applies capitals to those initial letters), a not insubstantial number of them had fought for our erstwhile enemies.
The 1960s and early 1970s were something of a golden age for cinematic descriptions of the Second World War. My neighbors, who had come to the Entertainment Capital of the World were frequently employed by various studios and production facilities as technical advisors, voiceover artists, editors, to say nothing of being in front of the camera, sometimes reprising on the silver screen roles very similar to the ones they had lived during the war. These were the years of such blockbusters as Battle of Britain, Sink the Bismarck, Tora Tora Tora, Patton, and a little bit later, Midway and MacArthur.
And in the Hollywood village that raised me, those men and women in their vigorous 50s often shared with us memories of a war that had receded, but was still fresh and alive in memory, of a war that had left Germany divided, at that time still to be reunified, of the Marshall Plan, and of the opportunities that come their way in Hollywood’s Entertainment Industry. My “village” was in many ways a microcosm of California at its best; it was a place where ancient enemies could become friends and neighbors. It was a place where Japanese veterans who had fought in Okinawa or Iwo Jima could break bread with British veterans of Normandy or the Rhine campaign, who in their turn could quaff Liebfraumilch or stout Bavarian lager with Wehrmacht veterans who had faced the Red Army at Kursk or Stalingrad. In their turn, those Wehrmacht veterans of the Russian front could exchange easy pleasantries with recent Israeli immigrant veterans who had fought their way into East Jerusalem during the Six-Day War, or veterans of the Free French who had liberated Paris in August of 1944.
These men and women, with their salt-and-pepper hair, their British, French, Asian, or “Mitteleuropa” accents, together with their American counterparts, represented the existential awfulness of war, but even more important, in our “village” in the Hollywood Hills, they represented also the best of the hopeful promise of peace. In our little piece of America, they also represented the two centuries old hope of a “United States of Europe,” in which the ancient quarrels and grievances could be laid to rest, in which the soaring prophecy of the fourth verse of the second chapter Isaiah should be fulfilled, that
[T]hey shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. Isa 2:4.
Those easy days of social interaction, among erstwhile enemies now become coworkers, friends, and neighbors, have also passed very much into eternity. The easy social interactions of those days have been interred with those who took part in them. Today, we have become a different community entirely. Today, it is unfashionable to speak of a “United States of Europe.” Today, instead of thinking about the importance of collective security, instead of acknowledging how astonishingly effective the United Nations has been in preventing another worldwide, all-out, shooting war, we find ourselves retreating into a kind of atavistic, existential posture of prewar confrontation.
Instead of acknowledging the reality of an interdependent world, in which chaos theory holds the beating of the wings of a butterfly in Beijing can cause hurricanes in Hialeah, and in which the shooting of an Archduke and his morganatic wife on that thrice-cursed day of Vidovdan can cause what Barbara Tuchman once referred to as “the red edges of war” to spread across the world, creatures like Donald Trump and his cabal of corrupt acolytes wage war against the rules-based international liberal democratic order which the world has struggled to create since the end of the Second World War.
Instead of considering carefully how a “village” such as the one by which I was raised could help create a climate of acceptance, reconciliation, and peace, Trump and his acolytes and redeless followers have behaved like the bullies who had no place in my elementary school in that “village.” When you went to school with kids whose granddads had fought with the 1st Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler Waffen SS division, or with the British 50th division, or with the 82nd and 101st Airborne, or who had served under either Chester Nimitz or Yamamoto Isoroku, or whose dads had stormed into East Jerusalem during the Six-Day War, there wasn’t a lot of room for the kind of ethnic or nationalist bullying we so often see in schools today.
My “village,” for a brief shining moment, had transcended much of the ethnic or national insecurity that has become so much a part of modern American life.
Was it for this that the men and women, both behind the lines and in the field, who made Neptune/Overlord a success, who risked life and limb in the last great crusade of our modern time, gave so very, very much? Did we storm ashore at Sword, Gold, Juno, Omaha, and Utah beaches just to return to and reinforce and restore in their fullest and most objectionable forms the dispensations that had obtained prior, not even to 1939, but to 1914?
As the Greatest Generation slips into eternity, and as World War II becomes little more than a greyscale period piece played at by reenactors for weekend pleasure, should we not meditate upon the waste we are laying to their sacrifice, and weep for it?
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, California, where he spent eight years on the city Council. He practices in the adjacent community of Rancho Mirage. Like many Americans, he had family who fought to save the civilized world during the Second World War. Like so many of that great generation, they have slipped into eternity, and he misses them terribly.
