i Editor's Letter: Commemorating the 70th anniversary of D-Day
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156,000 men landed. Tomorrow, about 1,000 of them will meet again in Normandy, travelling from around the globe: 600 British, 350 American and some Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and German veterans. The 70th anniversary commemorations of D-Day will be the last time many of these men travel to France. They will be joined by the Queen, Prince Charles, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and Angela Merkel. A mass parachute jump by the 16 Air Assault Brigade – Britain’s elite rapid reaction force – is scheduled for today.
I have seen tomorrow’s remembrance dismissed as glorification, celebration, industrial mawkishness. Rot. Of course we should do so much more for the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. But that doesn’t stop us from acknowledging the loss and suffering of our recent ancestors.
We will not mark this anniversary forever. Some of our history dies with us. Tomorrow’s tributes will be the last officially marked by the Normandy Veterans Association before it disbands.
When I was a child, my class was fortunate to visit the Normandy beaches, Pegasus Bridge and Bayeux Cemetery on a school trip. I have no familial connection to the landings, and am steeled to hearing the miseries and injustices of others’ lives. (That’s what a decade on news desks does for you.) But I find myself deeply affected by the sacrifice – inconceivable to me and so many of my generation – shown by our forebears.
Harry Prescott, 92, originally from Sunderland, was in a landing craft blown up a quarter of a mile from the French coast on 6 June 1944. He is back in Normandy this week. “I will lay a wooden cross at the grave of some of the lads who were with me in that boat,” he says. “Some were only 20 years old.”
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