D-Day and the Resonance of War . . . Now and Then
“ I ducked my head under the sharp cracking that was going overhead. “ --War correspondent Ernest Hemingway with U.S. troops under fire in a landing craft approaching France, June 6, 1944
Good morning, Normandy!
This is an invasion. The D-day documentaries, black-and-white newsreel footage and testimonials from military veterans and former riveting Rosies are this spring’s blitzkrieg, dusting off memories while massing on television in such force that you can hardly keep count.
With the 50th anniversary of the Allies’ liberating invasion of France so near, U.S. media are hitting Normandy with everything they’ve got, waves and waves of camera crews scurrying across its beaches like sand crabs.
Although the elements of spectacle are ever present, it’s encouraging, at least, to see television cover an event not of its own making.
The invasion cost the lives of 23,000 American troops. “Only those who were there know how horrendous it was,” ABC’s Peter Jennings reported on videotape from the French coast during Wednesday night’s “Turning Point.” Surely most on the home front never understood the horror.
Especially the children. Reared on simplified war movies that were as dispensable as popcorn and isolated from the actual killing fields by their geography, that generation of American kids sealed themselves inside an impenetrable play world where war was a dreamy reality at best and death was an abstraction.
There was no television to speak of during World War II and the immediate post-war years. No slaughters in Los Angeles, Bosnia, Haiti, Sudan, Gaza or Rwanda that anyone could see, no nightly pictures of rotted, fly-buzzed corpses baking in the sun. No wretched victims dying right there on the screen, nothing on a mass scale that could convey to the very young just how gory and grim war was. That wouldn’t happen until Vietnam.
“Real war is never like paper war,” Hemingway wrote, “nor do accounts of it read much the way it looks.”
To many kids of that era, it looked this way: Bang-bang, you’re alive.
I remember playing lots of baseball with my friends as a kid in Kansas City, Mo. Just as vivid are my memories of having fun playing guns.
For us, only one thing could compare to the crack of a bat hitting a ball, and that was the crack of gunfire, at least as we innocently imagined it. We provided our own sound effects, even our own danger (dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum) music. There was something very romantic about the fantasy of both shooting someone and pretending to get gunned down yourself, grunting and clutching your chest in mock agony while keeling over, then getting back up and starting the game again. To us, war was a game, an exercise in heroism minus real casualties.
Some things stay in your head. One afternoon in the winter of 1949, my neighbor Jody Aldrich and I returned from the Fiesta Theater excited and energized after watching a Saturday matinee of “Battleground,” a movie about Americans fighting and dying in the Battle of the Bulge. Hearts pounding, we tore into our houses and in only a few minutes were back outside with our plastic guns (I think mine was a Thompson’s submachine gun), brown infantry helmets and other soldier gear, re-fighting World War II in the snow. Being two years older than I, Jody pulled rank and, as a result, I got killed probably a dozen times that afternoon, hitting the white ground so often that my clothes took on a glacial rigidity. What fun.
It all came back to me while watching “Turning Point.” I contrasted my childhood war games with the recollections of Normandy survivors, their voices at times cracking with emotion after all these years.
“I curled up as small as I could.”
“Twenty or 30 G.I.s who had gotten up ran smack into a shell.”
“They were just mowed down.”
“Men were getting hit, you know, drowning.”
“His eyeballs . . . were hanging down.”
Reuniting America with its dead sons, the 90-minute program ended with an overview of white crosses at Normandy’s military cemetery, where so many soldiers are buried beneath a bit of the ground they fought to free.
During “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS Tuesday, artist and Normandy survivor Tracy Sugerman asserted that the memory of what happened there will be “dusty and meaningless” to today’s children and future generations. A disturbing thought. Yet sadly, he’s right, and it’s something that cannot be changed by all the history lessons in the world. Time is too great a barrier to overcome, rendering us all uncaring amnesiacs when it comes to the major crises experienced by our predecessors.
Thus, a lot of people are probably tiring of this history lesson that is now preoccupying so much television, even though it memorializes a seminal event of a war that changed the 20th Century. It must seem as abstract to them as it was to war-playing kids in 1949, especially compared to the contemporary violence that intersects their lives nightly via their favorite newscast. On CNN Thursday came this report from Rwanda: “We saw nine bodies. When we got closer, we could see five were alive, barely alive. Then we witnessed a government soldier shooting one.”
In the 1990s, business as usual.
Unfortunately, it’s hard for many to get worked up over Normandy when there’s so much in the present that competes for our attention and fear, as television relentlessly reminds us of today’s killing fields both abroad and in the United States, where even children--no longer the innocents of yesteryear--have access to firearms. And instead of toys, these guns are real.
Bang-bang, you’re dead.