Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 5, 1994 TAG: 9406080012
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Yet, as America celebrates the 50th anniversary of D-Day, the war's inevitably dark side cannot be forgotten. In those fateful hours in June 1944, some 150,000 sons of the world's democracies stormed into Nazi-held France. The Normandy beachhead was established from which the Allies could push toward the source of the Nazi horror - but thousands died in the effort.
The goodness of World War II resides partly in the unambiguous justness of the Allies' central goal, the deliverance from totalitarian evil of a sizable portion of the world. It resides partly in the unambiguous necessity, by the time the United States had become an official belligerent, of global war as the instrument of such deliverance.
Goodness resides, too, in the shared sacrifice that enabled the people of the Allied nations to win the war. And it resides in the heroism of those who paid their lives to reverse the totalitarian tide.
Among them are not only the troops who died in the first hours of D-Day but also those killed in the hard fighting of subsequent weeks. Not only those Americans killed in the liberation of France but also those in the Pacific theater, in North Africa, in the occupation of the Italian peninsula, in all the other places where U.S. troops fought and died. Not only Americans but also America's wartime allies - including, in tragic irony, the millions of Soviet citizens whose sacrifices helped defend an ideal of freedom that had been, and for years would be, denied them. Even to later generations accustomed to global marketplaces and moonwalks, the scope of World War II is hard to grasp.
Yet D-Day remains as important a chapter in the war as any, and its memory a half-century later continues to carry extraordinary power for Western Virginians. In the hardest of the fighting, on Omaha Beach, was the 29th Division's 116th Infantry Regiment - former National Guard units whose members, unlike those of Regular Army units, came not from all over the country but from the mountain-valley and piedmont regions of the Old Dominion. The regiment's Bedford-based Company A was in the first wave of the assault. Of the company's 200 men, nearly half lay dead by the end of the day; of the survivors, only 15 were unwounded.
Such an experience suggests a fundamental distinction: To remember the rightness of the cause and to honor the heroic response to the threat to freedom is not to assert the goodness that such a demand had to be made.
Let philosophers and theologians debate the nature of evil and the imperfectibility of man. Let historians debate their watersheds and turning points; social scientists their motivations and behavior. Surely it requires little debate to see that the necessity for a D-Day did not arise in a vacuum, any more than world wars arise in vacuums.
Scarcely 25 years before D-Day, an armistice had been signed to end the great war that was supposed to have ended all wars. It hadn't, of course.
With such policies as the Marshall Plan for Western Europe, the reconstruction of Japan and the containment of Soviet imperialism, America's World War II generation was determined that history would not repeat itself. That generation's greatness is marked not just by its fighting and winning a "good" war - but also by its making and keeping a postwar peace that lasted, albeit uneasily and imperfectly, to the end of its watch.
That heroes were on hand on the day the need for them arose was to the Allies' good fortune and great credit. Even better is the day when the need for wartime heroics is ended.
by CNB