Remembering the Original Antifa

Tomorrow marks the 80^th anniversary of The Longest Day, D-Day.

I was traveling with a US Army Helicopter Company from Hanau, Germany, to walk the beaches of Normandy, France in the late spring of 1984. Walking, as we did for hours in the sand, can wear you out and the fatigue is profound and overwhelming.

I could only wonder what, on D-Day, a GI with a seventy-pound rucksack, and all hell in front of and around him, was feeling. We had done interviews earlier that morning with elderly Frenchmen who, as men our present ages and sometimes only boys, had been accidental witnesses to history, triangulating linguistically, as they spoke no English and we, no French. 

One of them, to the undisguised scorn of the others, admitted he understood 'some German' and so I would ask him, Auf Deutsch, a question that he would rephrase into French and ask a neighbor who would reply, which he'd relay to me in German and which I'd then translate into English.

When you read about Normandy and the planning and staging that led up to it, it feels very different than when you walk the beaches you've read about. There's a taste in your mouth from the salty air and a breeze coming off the water that carries the screams of the gulls even farther.

I wondered if those struggling ashore, from the landing craft or parachuting down onto those maintaining their watch on the Atlantic Wall, had a moment to take in any of that. On a day when so many would die, was there a final split second to savor life? There was no one to ask except those we visited the next day, unable to answer for all eternity, at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.

After you've struggled to climb to Pointe du Hoc (up the stairs carved into the soft stone and NOT the way the Rangers had to, directly vertical), you can almost, but not quite, grasp what it was like for the soldiers of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, first to seize this emplacement and then, as the Nazi High Command realized, finally, the invasion wasn't a ruse but the real thing and threw itself at the Rangers trying to drive them over the cliffs and into the sea, how they held their positions for two days.

The 80th anniversary of D-Day is more than a date on the calendar. It's a reminder that evil can and must always be defeated. No matter the cost or the price. Young American men had been in Europe decades earlier, during World War I, the War to End All Wars, which didn't. What they couldn't know as they waded ashore and struggled to stay alive long enough to shoot back at those shooting at them, in less than a year, all the shooting in Europe would be over.

How much we've learned as a species in the eight decades since is a matter of debate and discussion (and for some, despair) as the young men, of all sides, who survived D-Day pass from our earth at a rate of thousands every day, taking with them every memory and meaning we might have shared, assuming we had cared enough to ask.

Santayana noted 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it' but those who remember that it was Santayana who said that are themselves also few and far between.
-bill kenny