Let’s all dream of D-Tomorrow

Never before had the evolving reality of war-as-machine been made so manifest, so concentrated in one place.

We’ll get to D-Day in a minute but, second things first, so let’s star t with ... D-Night.

As it does in June, the cover of darkness would’ve fallen late over the remains of a morning and afternoon consumed in martial fury, where, all along the chaotic theatre of exchange, artillery roared, casualties mounted, and life was bartered for life, for limb, a pound of flesh or an inch of position.

Those devils, Mayhem and Calamity, must have cackled. Where there wasn’t death, there was paralysis, or disfigurement, an eye for ... if not an eye, then half a jaw. Uneven ledgers. Blood and bits of body for bits of beach; severed foot for foothold, brains for beachhead. For the few unscathed, there was still the injur y of seeing their buddies being shattered.

After such harrowing witness, a day burned onto the retina of histor y with firebolts, the light sank and a world hung in the balance. June 6 saw the ragged sun of the war at a high meridian of pith and moment, and when it set, there came the night.

Still the fighting persisted, and as late as 11 p.m., Caen was being bombed from the air. Along the coast, as the amphibious fray exhausted itself, the beaches of Normandy stretched, not in hard-won repose, but as some long, dark altar of sacrifice, alarm, valour and struggle for recovery, the sand all but howling with blood.

Under the moon, bodies would have floated on an indifferent tide. At Omaha, which got it worst, the merciful colour blindness of the late hour must have been a relief to the haunted eyes of sur vivors, for they say the surf at Omaha was dyed red. Perhaps the Allied soldiers that day were promised glor y. In time, glor y they got, if such an idea has any meaning, but they could have but little suspected it that night. If they took stock, as they might have, on those ravaged beaches at the end of that ravaged day, they could not have been encouraged.

Though the ef for t had succeeded, after a limited fashion, the landing did not achieve even a single one of the strategic goals set out for the first day. Still, they had driven a wedge, however tenuous and costly, into Hitler’s Atlantic Wall.

Now, despite the uncertain progress, the invading force was more than a threat. It was more than a suspected, tensely awaited chess move in a game of guessing, the dodge and feint of warcraft. Where would they land? Misled by the encr ypted messages of Operation Fortitude, the Wehrmacht at first thought Calais.

Now the Allies were on the beaches of occupied France. They were real. Now, for Nazi Germany, they were — they would be — Nemesis itself. It would take days to join up the five beaches that were stormed — which had been a first-day goal. It would take weeks to liberate key towns and long months to press the small but palpable advantage they achieved that day, in through France and all the way to Germany, the Nazis in retreat.

But sure as thunder, the script had been flipped. The German offensive, a juggernaut for much of the war, had slowed; soon it would be on its heels, unable to recover momentum, and the prospect of eventual Nazi surrender deepened into absolute conviction with each passing day.

And then the war was over. That outcome, like petals folded into the fist of a bud before it opens, was contained, however incipiently, on those beaches on that day, bleak as they looked. And they looked bleak. Because the price exacted was so high, so grave. A monstrous price.

Still, D-Day is remembered, for all its expense of human life and shattered sanity. And it is remembered well. In 1999, it was D-Day, the Normandy invasion, of all the many events of an absurdly eventful centur y, that, according to a poll of news editors and broadcasters, that stood out as THE most important news story, at least to Canada.

On Juno Beach, the first Canadian assault began just before 8 a.m. It was beset with impediments — rough weather and submerged mines disrupting the approach. Engineers could not clear a safe path, and a third of the landing craft were destroyed or damaged. Heavy Canadian casualties ensued.

“I saw too much,” said a sur vivor, whose account I once read. His landing craft had stalled, then took a shelling which tore a hole in the metal side of it. The soldier lay in the water for hours, paralyzed. He would later be rescued but not before his brain and heart were force-fed a spectacle of death and terror, before his eyes, the deaths of his own mates and friends, almost as a mocker y of his inability to do anything about it.

As dramatic as the day was and the fighting, those landing craft and other materiel were a mar vel unto themselves. The aerial photographs you see of that day, before the first shots were fired, show a scene so vast, so orchestral with movement and massive machiner y, all converging on the beach. A scene so daunting that it is reminiscent — well, not really reminiscent (it came first) but premeniscent — of those trailers to blockbuster sci-fi conflict movies, scored with dire apocalyptic choral music, all kettledrums and massed voices, judgment day trumpets and strings like the cries of archangels. You half expect to hear that music when you see the pictures. Enormous battleships, materiel carriers, barrage balloons filling the air, and all-manner of amphibious tanks and artillery, landing craft, such as rhino ferries, some invented specially for the occasion, lumbering toward landfall, moving into place. It was — and remains — the largest seaborne invasion ever undertaken. Never before had the evolving reality of war-asmachine been made so manifest, so concentrated in one place. Machine upon machine. Mechanical and clinical, administered from ever greater distances. If war started in the savagery of clubs and rocks, here it was on D-Day whetted to a bayonet point of steel ef ficiency. Except for the biggest machine of all, the soft one of human troops, an unbelievable 150,000 in all on D-Day. The soft machine with one way to go; no swimming back to Dover.

The planning that went into D-Day is, of course, legendary. In modern combat, wars are always fought twice. First primly, by generals in clean map rooms, plying the trade and science of warfare, amid battle modelling and surveillance reports, perhaps puffed up with Napoleonic hubris.

Then the wars are fought a second time, for real, by hapless soldiers in the muck and blood of ripped up salients and battlegrounds, with all the elaborate plans just as torn to tatters as the troops and replaced by confusion, horror and pure sur vival impulses.

At D-Day there were secret code names and tricker y, calculations of winds and tide, logistics and precision. What could go wrong? As ever, the unruly weather and seas laughed at the plans of men. Troops were swept as much as a mile or more off course by rugged currents and under tows. Nothing about the campaign was terribly orderly despite the organizational rigor. And D-Day, for all its fame, was but one of many, many headlines from the time. June 5, the day before D-Day, Rome was re-captured from the Nazis. A huge development on its own. There was an Italian campaign and an eastern front, both of which could compete with D-Day for biggest float in the ultimate victor y parade.

And even as the troops poured onto the beaches, far away in one direction atoms were being smashed together in secret laboratories, saying as they split apart, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

And in the other direction, concentration camps were waiting to be opened by eventual liberators and spill their unspeakable horror to a humanity that would not like this mirror on itself, this unforgettable, hitherto unimaginably monstrous secret.

Still, amid and against all this, whether it deser ves the distinction or not, D-Day has emerged as the symbol of the great turning, the great pivot from defeat and despair to hope. Some argue that the dominant social narrative we still largely live with today was set in place by that pivoting, by that mythically imbued tilt toward triumph in that world war. Not just victor y in battle but the triumph of whatever values the Second World War has come to stand for. Freedom? Secular modernism? The transcending of zero-sum nationalism and bigotries for the more palatable goal of a more universal justice and a truer, more widespread democracy?

The Second World War is often characterized as the wor thy world war, the one that had to be fought, on moral grounds, as opposed to First World War, which seemed to be one horrible committee of adjustment meeting gone terribly and cynically wrong, over a few local variances.

But the truth is, in terms of absolute terror and destruction, there is no comparison. The death toll of the Second World War has been estimated at anywhere from 50 to 85 million, most of those civilian, compared to 17 or 18 million in the First World War, most of those militar y.

It is a hard and a continual challenge to make sense of war, any war, even those that seem to have the most compelling reasons for being fought. What did D-Day’s genesis of victor y really mean? What did it import for the future, the world we have come to live in? Are we still living in a kind of D-Night, waiting on the beach for a morally clearer D-Tomorrow?

Is whatever heroism there was that day being betrayed now by failures of democracy, by backsliding and returns to nation against nation, race against race, faith against faith against secularism and science?

I think it’s our duty to make the sacrifices of D-Day continually meaningful; is it not our por tion to pick up the torch, no matter how feebly and often dropped, to progress through the dialectic? Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that whole war was just part of the inexplicable lurchings of a crazed wayward species through a maze of pointless histor y that seems to have no destination programmed into it. We might ask if there’s anything left to remember, any reason to revisit those shores?

If the waves there could remember that day, or the night, would they? If we asked the waters that washed over those beaches June 6, on whose tides the bodies were borne back and forth along the shingle, what would be their testimonial?

“No, can’t say as I recall,” a whitecap breaker might answer. “I’ve been flinging these Normandy pebbles to and fro for a long time. One day’s like another. Big machines? Lotsa men? No. What about you, Omaha? Remember going red with blood that time? Sorry, people, can’t help ya.”

Don’t listen to the waves then. Listen to the future. On June 6, I will bend my mind that way. I will remember, ahead. If we don’t summon forth, in recover y, at least the dream of what that day meant, whether real or not, if we don’t heed the larger lesson it was supposed to teach, for times to come, we are more truly lost than we think.

Join me, if you will. Remember.