Zoe Strimpel
Millennials owe their life of luxury to the heroes of D-day
The nearest many of us come to ‘danger’ is being exposed to ‘offensive’ ideas
Always a keen outdoor summer swimmer, last year I decided to keep going… and going. Having never thought myself capable of such extremes, I none the less found myself climbing briskly down a ladder, into an ice-laden Hampstead Heath Ladies pond, four days a week.
I became almost addicted to it, as many others have done since winter swimming became trendy. Why? It wasn’t the feeling of gravel and ice on bare feet, the breath-stealing shock of getting in, the pain in my feet and numbness in my hands, or indeed the shivering in the unheated changing room that followed after a freezing shower. What hooked me was the sense of being pitted against the harshest of elements and, of course, the sense of camaraderie with the other hardy lady lunatics.
My generation, living in the comfort of the modern West, is incredibly lucky to have to manufacture opportunities like this to show grit in the face of adversity. The closest many of us get to real discomfort and pain is our fitness regimes.
Over the past week, as the Allied
nations celebrated the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, I found myself wondering how we would have fared landing in Normandy on June 6 1944. After all, aside from extreme forms of exercise, the nearest many of us come to “danger” is being exposed to “offensive” ideas. A noisy, powerful contingent of millennials, also known as SJWs (social justice warriors), is engaged in fierce battles not for real freedom, which the war generation understood as a grave matter of life or death, but freedom from offence.
Danger to these indignant young people means being confronted with texts, speech or ideas deemed transphobic, imperialist, racist, sexist, ableist, fattist and so on. Just being asked to read the work of “dead white men” makes some students feel “unsafe”. Danger, by contrast, to the young men landing on the beaches of Normandy, meant something else. A young American soldier recalled the scene: “Ashore, facing us, were more enemy troops than we had in our assault waves… The Germans were dug into positions that they had been working on for months… Then they had hidden machine-gun nests on the forward slopes, with crossfire taking in every inch of the beach…” The prospect was as deadly as it was terrifying: on D-Day alone 4,414 Allied troops died, with a further 5,000-odd wounded or missing.
It has become a truism, particularly among the young and the Left that war, waged by the West, is “bad” – a form of imperialist mass murder. Yet the men fighting for the Allies at D-Day understood how it could be, and was, the opposite, and this courageous understanding stayed with them even as they faced death. As I read their accounts last week, I thought about the young men certain friends of mine encounter on Tinder – callous, inconsiderate, commitmentphobic, self-absorbed, rude to their families – and found myself mourning the passing of this physically gutsy and morally brave generation, as considerate and kind to their loved ones as they were clear-sighted about their cause.
At a commemorative ceremony in Portsmouth on Wednesday, attended by 60,000, Theresa May read aloud a letter written by Captain Norman Skinner of the Royal Army Service Corps. Norman was the father of two young daughters, and would have been in his 20s when he wrote to his wife, Gladys, on June 3 1944, two days before he died.
“My darling this is a very difficult letter for me to write,” he began. “As you know something may happen at any moment and I cannot tell when you will receive this…” He continued that he was imagining Gladys in their sunny garden, getting ready to put their daughters to bed. But fear and longing for safety and home had not clouded his sense of purpose. “Although I would give anything to be back with you, I have not yet had any wish at all to back down from the job we have to do.”
Tears pricked my eyes even more on reading the letter home of a 16-year-old French resistance fighter, about to be executed by soldiers from his own nation. “I am going to die for my country,” the lad wrote. “I want France to be free and the French to be happy. I do not want France to be arrogant and the world’s leading nation but hard-working, industrious and honest.” He comforted his parents that if his writing looked wobbly, it was the smallness of his pencil, not fear, and instructed them: “Do not worry about me. I will keep my bravery and good humour to the last,” concluding with the heartbreaking realisation that “it is hard to face death”.
I’d like to think that some of our teenage boys, presently fretting over GCSEs, would be capable of such extreme grace and courage. We can’t know, and I hope we’ll never have to find out. What we can do, though, is acknowledge that without the extraordinary actions of that generation, we wouldn’t have the luxury to even ponder the question.