I have hung my flag out today, as I do on the other patriotic occasions in the calendar when we celebrate our country, its invention and survival — Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Veterans Day. Today, of course, is the 70th anniversary of D-Day which has become a kind of proxy for celebrating victory in World War II over real, unambiguous evil in Japan and Germany.
My Dad was on Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands for a year and a half keeping the B-29s that were burning Japan aloft. It is a measure of the world-spanning, titanic scale of the conflict that this insignificant atoll was, for a few months in 1945, the busiest airport in the world.
Because of his service in the Pacific, I have always thought the primacy of the European Theater in the popular imagination a bit lopsided. The Pacific War tends to get boiled down to Pearl Harbor, Midway, Iwo Jima, Hiroshima, but I get why.
Europe is more familiar to most Americans, or was then. The war there was more cinematic, the story line more varied — Paris occupied, the Blitz, combat in the desert, in Sicily, in Italy, D-Day, the liberation of Paris, the Bulge, surrender. The heroes and villains were larger than life — Churchill, Hitler. And there was even a built in sequel, though it descended from Good vs. Evil to film noir. Unfortunately the ally of democratic good vs totalitarian evil was another iteration of totalitarian evil with another world class villain in charge, Stalin.
No wonder we have chosen to remember prevailing in world War II on the anniversary of D-Day. It was an immense accomplishment to have trained, equipped and transported enough men to make the invasion plausible, another to have contrived to put them and the needed materiel ashore and to keep them supplied as they did the frightening, courageous, bloody work of securing a toehold, consolidating it and then driving for Paris, across the Rhine and on to the victory.
We really were greeted as liberators then. The contrast between our side and the other side was stark and unequivocal. Since then, after the bomb, the death camps, the long twilight struggle, the world has seemed a far less black and white place.
In the entertaining Cold War potboiler, “Three Days of the Condor,” John Housman as the CIA chief is asked by a young acolyte about his World War II service, “Do you miss that kind of action?” To which he replies with some asperity, “I miss that kind of clarity.” Don’t we all.
Philip Larkin, writing of 1914, said, “Never such innocence again.” That was probably true, as the reluctance of many in the thirties to get involved in another war suggests. Still, remembering D-Day and what our fathers or grandfathers did, it is hard not to have a similar feeling. Never such optimism again, perhaps. Such confidence. Such unanimity. It was a moment when we knew what was right, had the power and resources to do right and had the men capable of rising to the occasion.
Interestingly, those who went rarely wanted to talk about it afterward. My dad didn’t, though his uniform hung in the back of the closet for a couple decades and his insignia and metals resided in my mom’s jewelry box. Their attitude seemed to me like that of a man who discovers there’s a poisonous snake near the house. They didn’t want to go get it, but it had to be done. So they went, found it, killed it, went home and hoped never to have to do it again. We, I hope, have never forgotten what they did or how much we owe them. That’s why the flag is on my front porch today.