We had a great surprise and honor to host for Christmas our French in-laws, who came down from northern Virginia with our oldest son and his family.
As we celebrated with caviar and French champagne they brought with them, I asked the father-in-law if there were still vestiges of the Normandy invasion visible on the Brittany coast where they live.
He said the pockmarks in the earth due to bombs and cannon fire were pretty much gone by now. However, he showed me photos of a concrete structure still intact in the local harbor near his house where the Nazis built and assembled U-boat submarines during their occupation of France during World War II.
Aside from the bone-chilling realization these submarines were used to sink American and Allied ships and killed untold thousands of Allied soldiers and civilians — some attacks were as far away as off the coast of North Carolina near Atlantic Beach and Beaufort — there was the startling revelation that the D-Day invasion was close to a century ago. Many young people today have very little understanding or appreciation for the magnitude of what happened during D-Day and why it is still so important to us today.
What happened on the western coast of France on D-Day and thereafter was one of the most important events in human history. It saved the Western civilization we in Europe and America take mostly for granted. Historians often point to the Battle of Thermopylae, where a small band of 300 Spartans under King Leonidas (made popular in the 2006 movie “300”) held off the Persians, as being perhaps the first crucial battle victory where Western civilization was saved and allowed to continue to develop. The small, brave army of 300 Spartans held off the massive Persian army for just long enough to allow the Greek army to get back to Athens to help evacuate the city and protect it from the advance of the Persians, who would have surely destroyed all the buildings, art and literature that are the basis of our very existence today.
The D-Day invasion of American, English, Canadian and Australian forces working in coordination with French Resistance forces surely turned back the history of such destruction of Western civilization and deserves to be remembered and celebrated as such. Had the Allies not invaded Normandy’s beaches and ultimately succeeded, the Nazis, under the megalomaniac Adolf Hitler, would have surely dominated Europe and murdered tens or hundreds of millions more people.
The more we talked, since he lived on the very soil where Western civilization was saved again, I suggested to my French in-law there should be an annual international holiday and celebration on June 6 in Europe and America to remember and commemorate the bravery and success of the D-Day invasion, a suggestion to which he raised his glass and heartily agreed.
There are somber commemorations and tributes nowadays for the brave soldiers who were there on D-Day. But shouldn’t there be a national holiday in every country on the same date with parades, fireworks and speeches by all Western nations who were saved from utter annihilation had the D-Day invasion never been planned, ordered to commence or ultimately succeeded when Germany surrendered less than a year later?
For one thing, it sure would teach younger generations about what it took to deliver the freedoms many take for granted today in each country. But it would also bind all democratic republics together in a single, solemn day of remembrance and prayer for what our fathers and grandparents did not just for one country but for freedom of thought, speech, religion and democratic government in all Western countries combined.
At a time when some relationships between former Allies can be fractured along modern political differences, such a shared celebration might help bind all freedom-loving nations and citizens back together again on common shared ground. There are still attacks on all the principles that bound together the Allies in the 1940s by various forces, such as Islamist terrorists around the globe. If we don’t collectively remember what those shared values are, surely these attacks will continue to undermine the safety and security of everyone who considers themselves to be fortunate to live in Western civilization.
Every national holiday has its own special importance. However, none can be more important than the day the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy in France on June 6, 1944.
It is time to remember and celebrate the exceptionalism it took to win such a terrible war against murderous regimes.
