
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, October 4, 1994                   TAG: 9410040063
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WHY NO MEMORIAL YET FOR D-DAY?

A D-DAY memorial should have a purpose nobler than to be a marketable asset drawing tourists to its host city. Above all else, it should help keep alive the memory of the awful sacrifices a generation of Americans made to crush Nazi Germany's war machine.

That objective makes especially attractive Bedford's offer of $250,000 worth of incentives - as much as 20 acres, infrastructure and perpetual maintenance - to lure a national D-Day memorial to that city. What better place to honor the memory of those who fell than Bedford, which lost 19 of its young men in the first dreadful day of the invasion?

Nineteen Bedford men from Company A, 116th Regiment of the 29th Infantry Division, were killed on June 6, 1944. They were part of the first wave of attack on Omaha Beach, where 2,500 men would die in the fiercest fighting on any of the five beaches involved.

Bedford's loss, the most that any single community sacrificed on D-Day, was devastating to such a small city. Mayor Michael Shelton is not devising a marketing strategy when he says that that gash in the heart of his city is "something permanently embedded in the Bedford community."

A national D-Day memorial would be a step toward ensuring that the struggle against evil, which the invasion exemplified, will remain embedded in the national memory as well.

It is obscene that neo-Nazism appears to be on the rise in Europe at a time when so many 50-year anniversaries are being marked to recall events leading to the Third Reich's demise. A generation that witnessed so much suffering, fought with such courage and returned home so triumphantly slipped quietly - perhaps too quietly - back into their civilian lives, absorbed with adjusting to the sea change that a world war had brought.

As members of that generation die, some of their children, and more of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, do not understand the epochal events of that time and how they shaped the world today. Or that D-Day, the first day of the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Western Europe, was key among them.

After the 50th anniversary, it is way past time to correct that.

It would be premature, of course, to decide on Bedford as the site for a memorial before Roanoke's offer has been made. Roanoke, headquarters of the 116th Regiment that included companies from across Central and Western Virginia, also has an honored place in the history of the invasion. And Roanoke has the added advantages of an airport and plentiful hotels and restaurants to serve visitors. If the memorial is to fulfill its mission, it should be easily accessible to as many visitors as possible.

But Bedford clearly wants the memorial, whereas Roanoke thus far has shown mainly indifference to the idea. And Bedford is not far away at all. It is not implausible to imagine visitors to Roanoke enjoying the attractions here - developed to their full potential - and taking a day trip to Bedford to reflect on the D-Day drama. Bedford is certainly part of the region, and of its economy.

Whichever the choice, though, let it be for the principal purpose of paying the greatest honor to all Americans who fought and prevailed over fascism and, in so doing, protected freedoms that later generations take for granted.

by CNB