June 6, 2007
Normandy Beach, 2004 Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:20 PM EST Three years ago I had the privilege of attending the sixtieth anniversary of the Normandy invasion in the company of some American veterans of the invasion. Three years on, not too much of a fuss is being made about June 6. This may be a mild improvement on the sixtieth anniversary itself, at least in Europe, where in 2004 there was a lot of noise about a supposed paradox of June 6, of which more below. That day, after the ceremony, one of my most vivid memories is of bumping into a lively, sturdy octogenarian accompanied by two gigantic and affable middle-aged sons, the older guy a veteran of the 16th Infantry, one of the two regiments that first landed on Omaha Beach. He was an obviously Polish-American retired auto worker with a sense of humor: “It’s an Irish name,” he explained of his mass of consonants. When queried, he announced that he’d been in F Company—which I happened to know took 91 percent casualties—and he’d hit the beach in the first wave: “Nothing in front of me except a fish, pal!” Bumping into him and his sons a couple of days later, you learned a bit more. Within a very few minutes he was the only survivor of his platoon. He was skeptical about films of men running up the beach to attack the German fortifications—he thought it had taken him 10 hours to crawl 10 yards—and proud of the fact that to the best of his knowledge, sick with swallowed seawater, amid omnipresent shelling and machine-gun fire, he’d been the first American to relieve himself in France, although those were not his precise words. It was a cheerfully self-mocking and in part antiheroic story, yet according to his sons, when he saw current members of the First Infantry Division at the cemetery, he pumped his fist and shouted “Big Red One!” And they pumped their fists too, and shouted back: “Big Red One! Wahoo!” Maybe pumping your fist, grinning, and shouting is mere theatricality. Or maybe that’s the real part, and joking about how frightened you were is the theater. The man seemed impervious to what the French commentariat had taken to calling the paradox of June 6. It wasn’t always entirely clear what they meant by this, but the paradox seemed to result from a collision of the lingering (sometimes grudging, sometimes palpably sincere) French enthusiasm for being liberated with the broad French loathing of the American and British attempt to extend what was described as a similar favor to the Iraqis. The French commentariat insisted that these efforts had nothing whatever in common, and that the two Americas—Bush’s and Roosevelt’s—had nothing in common either. That same week Le Monde ran a headline speculating on the date for the construction of an American gulag, and one striking proposal sought to deny Bush access to France on the sixtieth anniversary: Bush led an America that “does not chase out an occupier, but occupies, does not crush oppressors, but oppresses, does not chase out an invader, but invades, does not crush fascism, but nurtures its ‘Islamist’ form.” To most Anglo-American eyes this list of antitheses, while disturbing, was imperfectly persuasive: The Americans and British had crushed one form of Iraqi fascism at the risk of abetting another; they had removed an Iraqi oppressor while at least a few of them had resorted to some shameful oppressive tactics themselves; etc. But these smaller paradoxes did not aggregate to a vast and paralyzing paradox of June 6. The Anglo-American mind may be less supple than the Gallic journalistic mind tends to be—these paradoxes were troubling, rather than dispositive, and they were less airily entertaining to the reader than they’d probably been to the writer—but after fuller consideration, they did not seem irresolvable. Speculation about an imminent American gulag suggested an imperfect familiarity with Mogadan, Vorkuta, and Kolyma. And the paradox of June 6 lost some of its tension in the face of the trouble various European opponents of the Iraq war had in getting their story straight. Up the beach at Arromanches, then-Chancellor Schroeder was insisting that Germany, too, had been liberated on D-day. None of the vets on my tour remembered the Germans welcoming this liberation with any great enthusiasm; a number of them still carried scars, and a few shrapnel, which they thought testimony to the imperfect German appreciation for their efforts. In ’44 and ’45, the Germans had resisted their liberation much more strenuously than the Iraqis had in 2003, and if thousands of Iraqis were trying to blow up their liberators a year on, and mutilate their corpses, this may have been because the liberators didn’t have any French troops with them. Back in ’45, the French had replied to terror aimed at their occupation force with extremely effective mass reprisals. That day in Normandy, a darker thought intruded: Maybe there was no German insurgency after the war because the British and Americans had taken fewer pains to spare German civilian lives during it, and those civilian deaths may have finally soured the Germans on war. When truly aroused, the Americans and British practiced terror wholesale. Retail terror as a resistance tactic may not have seemed a very promising approach in 1945. In any case, Schroeder seemed to think that Germans could be liberated despite their striking lack of cooperation in the process, although he did not seem to have worked out that this was a dangerously suggestive argument, one capable of extension from the Rhine to the Euphrates. And as it happened, not all the civilian dead had been German. Many thousands of French civilians had died in the course of the Normandy invasion and the subsequent fighting. Perhaps this was some part of what the French meant by the paradox of June 6. But while some of the European commentators made a few attempts to imply that those civilian deaths dissolved any moral credit that might otherwise have attended the American and British destruction of a tyranny, this move did not seem to catch on. Most of the French, at least, seemed to understand that freeing France was worth civilian casualties. They were at least as confident that freeing Iraq from Saddam wasn’t. Maybe that was because the French and Germans had grown more tender-hearted over 60 years (although the Algerians, the Tutsi and the Bosnian Muslims, among others, might have doubted this interpretation). Or maybe they just cared less about other people’s liberty than they did about their own. A most ingenious paradox, that French paradox of June 6, but it resisted easy unpacking. Now it seems to have disappeared. This year, no one is making noise about how we are betraying our legacy, nor, for that matter, about the legacy itself. In Northern Lebanon, the Lebanese army is crushing some terrorists hiding amidst civilians with tactics at least as indiscriminate as any the Americans were using in 2004. No great paradox is being observed about that event either.
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