By George Will
Thursday, June 06, 2019
On a bluff above the sand and a half-mile from the
ocean’s edge at low tide, which was the condition when the first Allied
soldiers left their landing craft, a round circle of concrete five feet in
diameter provides a collar for a hole in the ground. On the morning of June 6,
1944, the hole was Widerstandsnest (nest of resistance) 62, a German
machine-gun emplacement.
Hein Severloh had been in it since shortly after
midnight, by which time U.S. aircraft were droning overhead, having dropped
young American paratroopers Severloh’s age behind the beaches to disrupt German
attempts to rush in reinforcements. Severloh had been billeted near Bayeux,
home of the eleventh-century tapestry depicting a cross-Channel invasion that
went the other way, taking William, Duke of Normandy, to become William the
Conqueror, England’s sovereign.
Severloh believed that he killed hundreds of GIs, so long
and slow was their walk to the safety, such as it was, of the five-foot
embankment where the beach meets the bluff. Severloh returned here in sorrow
and was consoled by survivors of the forces that waded ashore.
Today, a frequently seen bumper sticker proclaims: “War
is not the answer.” But here, especially, it is well to remember that whether
war is the answer depends on the question.
War was the answer to what ailed Europe in 1944. “In
1942,” writes Timothy Garton Ash of Oxford and Stanford’s Hoover Institution,
“there were only four perilously free countries in Europe: Britain,
Switzerland, Sweden and Ireland.” Twenty years — a historical blink — later,
almost all of Western Europe was free. Twenty years after that, Spain, Portugal
and Greece had joined the liberal democracies. Today, for the first time in
2,500 years, most Europeans live under such governments.
Ash argues that Europe cannot define itself negatively —
as not America or not Islam. “Europe’s only defining ‘other’ is
its own previous self” — its self-destructive, sometimes barbaric past. “This
is,” Ash says, “still a very recent past.”
In 1951, just seven years after Severloh and some other
Germans surrendered on June 7 to Americans at the village of St. Laurent,
Europe began building the institutions that it hoped would keep such young men
out of machine-gun emplacements. It created the European Coal and Steel
Community, precursor of the Common Market (1958), which led to the single
market in 1993 and the common currency in 2002.
The implicit hope was that commerce could tame Europe’s
turbulent nations. The perennial problem of politics — mankind’s susceptibility
to storms of passions — could perhaps be solved, or at least substantially
ameliorated, by getting Europe’s peoples to sublimate their energies in
economic activities. The quest for improved material well-being would drain
away energies hitherto tapped and channeled by demagogues.
Reminders of Europe’s problematic past were recently
found a few miles from St. Laurent. Workers preparing a foundation for a new
house overlooking Omaha Beach came upon parts of the bodies of two German
soldiers. There was scant media attention to this because such discoveries have
not been rare.
Also near here, 21,160 German soldiers are buried at La
Cambe Cemetery. Thirty percent — more than 6,000 — were never identified, so
some German parents conducted “assumed burials.” They placed metal markers
bearing the names of their missing sons near the graves of unknown soldiers who
were known to have died near where the parents’ sons were last known to be
fighting.
Such heartbreaking stories are written into Normandy’s
lovely landscape. At the American Cemetery overlooking this beach, amid the
many rows of white marble gravestones, are two, side by side, marking the
burial places of Ollie Reed and Ollie Reed Jr., a father and his son. The son,
an Army first lieutenant, died in Italy on July 6. His father, an Army colonel,
was killed on July 30 in Normandy. Two telegrams notified the father’s wife,
the son’s mother. The telegrams arrived in Manhattan, Kan., 45 minutes apart.
The 19th-century French scholar Ernest Renan, from a
Brittany town on the English Channel, defined a nation as a community of shared
memory — and shared forgetting. Europe’s emotional equipoise, and the
transformation of “Europe” from a geographical to a political expression, has
required both remembering and forgetting. Americans who make pilgrimages to
this haunting place are reminded of their role, and their stake, in that
transformation.
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