D-Day Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

D-Day + 80 years

National WWII Museum

Today is D-Day +80 years. Since someone asked, D-Day stands for Day-Day. “D-Day and H-Hour are used for the day and hour on which a combat attack or operation is to be initiated.” June 6, 1944, “was so iconic that it came to be used solely when referring to the beginning of Operation Overlord.”

This year, I learned about the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. The site has several articles about the anniversary.

Surprisingly, the number of the war dead from that day is still in dispute. “Of the 4,414 Allied deaths on June 6th, 2,501 were Americans and 1,913 were Allies. If the figure sounds low…, it’s probably because we’re used to seeing estimates of the total number of D-Day casualties, which includes fatalities, the wounded, and the missing.

“While casualty figures are notoriously difficult to verify… the accepted estimate is that the Allies suffered 10,000 total casualties on D-Day itself. The highest casualties occurred on Omaha Beach, where 2,000 U.S. troops were killed, wounded, or went missing; at Sword Beach and Gold Beach, where 2,000 British troops were killed, wounded, or went missing; and at Juno Beach, where 340 Canadian soldiers were killed and another 574 wounded.

“The vast majority of the men who died perished in the very first waves of the attack. The first soldiers out of the landing craft were gunned down by German artillery. Once those pillboxes were destroyed and the machine guns silenced, the later waves of troops faced far better odds.”

There was a disastrous dry run 40 days earlier, so the success of the actual invasion was remarkable.

Albany is represented

From the Albany City School District website: “The Albany Marching Falcons officially kicked off their trip to France on Tuesday morning, loading their luggage, their instruments, and themselves onto two chartered buses bound for an evening flight from JFK International Airport to Paris.

“The group – some 50 City School District of Albany students from grades 6-12” -at least two of whom I know– “will be part of France’s official commemoration of the 80th anniversary of D-Day. They were accompanied by marching arts director Brian Cady and numerous chaperones and family members.

“Take a look at a Facebook photo album of the sendoff.

“Led by director Bryan Cady, the Marching Falcons will be one of only two bands from the U.S. invited to perform on Omaha Beach in Normandy. [The other is from the University of Florida.] The Marching Falcons will also perform at D-Day memorial concerts in Falaise, Saint Laurent-sur-Mer, and Paris before heading back to Albany on June 11.”

Pass

I watched this CBS News story about the WWII museum. A 99-year-old vet told the story of his deployment to kids eight decades his junior.

In the narrative, one teen asked his father to watch the movie Saving Private Ryan. That caught my attention because I decided in 1998 that I would not see the film. I saw previews in the movie theater and a brief clip during the Oscars.

Esquire magazine ran a story in 2023: 25 Years on, Saving Private Ryan’s Opening Scene Remains Cinema’s Most Brutal Depiction of War. Steven Spielberg’s Omaha Beach landings are not for the faint of heart. And that’s the point.

I guess I’m of the faint of heart.

“The 24-minute sequence captures war in a way that we hadn’t seen before, and hasn’t been matched since. It’s the nervous shakes that possess [Tom] Hanks’ hands. The vomit. The desperate surprise of soldiers drowning in the shallows, dragged down by their gear. The indiscriminate German bullets landing with a ‘puft’ in American chests. The relentless machine gun fire and explosions. The arms blown off, the guts hanging out, all of it captured by a cameraman running alongside the actors, instructed to pan to whatever part of the horror caught his attention.”

Some extremely small part of me says that I ought to watch it. Then the “hell, no” part of me wins out. Still, I’m glad it exists.

“To watch this opening salvo is to witness this veteran’s story transposed directly onto the screen. It’s a guttural, terrifying sequence that plays like something from a horror film. As it should; so realistic was this beach assault that it was reported to have triggered PTSD in veterans.”

Rather like war itself, no matter the cause.

The lasting trauma of war

avoiding protracted war in the first place

Normandy landing I never saw the movie Saving Private Ryan. Didn’t think seeing the apparently realistic depiction of hundreds of soldiers being shot during the D-Day action at Normandy was something I wanted to experience.

Even 75 years after D-Day, we’re still learning about the campaign. Classified maps and documents reveal the careful planning that went into the invasion, “as Allied commanders orchestrated how to begin liberating Europe from Nazi tyranny.”

Not incidentally, today, members of the Albany (NY HS) Marching Falcons marched along Omaha Beach from Vierville-sur-Mer to St. Laurent-sur-Mer, two towns liberated during the Normandy invasion by American and Allied forces. They’ll also participate in the wreath-laying ceremony at the Normandy American cemetery.

Most World War II veterans didn’t talk about the war, at least not in their twenties or thirties or forties or fifties. But as they got older, some of them were willing to share their stories, no matter how gruesome and devastating. The storytelling is more important than ever. Out of 16 million US veterans of WWII, fewer than a half million were still alive in 2018, with about 348 dying each day.

Meanwhile, for our more recent veterans, Civilians Are Blind To The Lasting Trauma Of War. “Shortly before Memorial Day weekend, the U.S. Army posed a broad question to veterans, prodding them to talk about how serving America ‘impacted’ their lives. [They]…offered a stream of stories that comprise a very different picture [than expected]: suicide, depression, PTSD, poverty, drug addiction, living with physical disabilities and a sense of abandonment from the Army itself.”

There are ways that folks can give back to veterans. The harder task would be finding Ways You Can Support a Veteran Living With PTSD. Veterans have a suicide rate 50% higher than the general population.

“In recent decades, we’ve seen a widening experiential divide between civilians and soldiers in American life. The U.S. has one of the largest all-volunteer armies in the world, and while that may sound good on paper, it’s really not.

“Volunteerism means that military service is vulnerable to stratification by class and race.” Those distinctions, of course, also existed during the draft for the Vietnam war, but the broader point remains true.

“Addressing war’s lasting trauma — and avoiding protracted war in the first place — should be a defining issue in politics right now.”

D-Day; Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was just this FORCE, her speaking voice like music, her wisdom and compassion evident in every sentence.

As D-Day approaches, all I can think about are 90-year-old men who saw awful things but sucked it up to get through the events, and then stoically never talked about them. That is until 50 or 60 or 70 years later – goaded by family members or in recognition of their own mortality, as at least 600 WWII vets die EVERY DAY in the US – they start telling their stories. And while unique, they are the same story, of friends, of an officer who died that day, of bodies they tripped over while trying to maintain their position.

And, almost inevitably, they cry. They weep for those comrades they still know by name 70 years after they perished, tears that they weren’t allowed to shed at the time because it wouldn’t have been “manly.”

In some ways, it reminds me of the Holocaust survivors who blocked out the horror they saw until much later. They say “war is hell” for a reason. And that was a conflict generally supported by the American public, something I must say I’ve never really experienced in my lifetime; either initially or subsequently, Americans have grown weary of the wars we fought.

So World War II becomes “the good war.” As though there is any such thing.

All these people have written these great Maya Angelou stories and cited her quotes. And while I’ve read a lot of great tributes to her, I don’t have one and haven’t seen one, that exactly captures my feelings, though “Scandal” and “Grey’s Anatomy” showrunner Shonda Rhimes tweeting simply, “Maya” is pretty close.

I mean, I remember seeing the 1979 TV adaptation of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and only reading the book later. Or I could note seeing her in everything from Roots to Sesame Street to Touched by an Angel. Sometime recently, I even linked to her calypso singing. Unfortunately, I never met her, though I’m likely to have been as tongue-tied as Keef was.

But for me, she was just this FORCE, her speaking voice like music, her wisdom and compassion evident in every sentence. For decades she was like a grandmother talking, trying to relay important knowledge.

I bought for The Wife, probably for some occasion in early 2002 – Valentine’s Day or our anniversary – Hallmark tan/green pottery bowl with these Maya Angelou words inside: “Life is a glorious banquet, a limitless and delicious buffet.”

The morning Maya died, I was reading someone’s Facebook post, someone who was hoping that she would get better after she’d declined to attend some event in her honor. Then the Albany NBC-TV affiliate, WNYT, citing a station in Winston-Salem, NC reported her death. But still, I waited until other sources confirmed it – and her Wikipedia post quickly noted her in the past tense – before I could really believe it.