As you get this Post, I am in the Italian Alps at my granddaughter’s wedding. But even on this festive day, my memory turns back to another time and place – 1944 in a country church near Pilot Mountain, NC. The events that brought a four-year-old boy to that church happened 78 years ago. In a place far from Tobacco Road, a place I first visited 50 years later.

D-Day: 6 June 1944 Normandy, “The Longest Day”

People sleep peaceably in their beds only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. George Orwell

I was two years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. My parents soon moved to Baltimore where they worked at the Glenn L. Martin aircraft factory making B-26 Marauders. They left me with Grandfather and Grandmother Hoots on an isolated farm. The nearest neighbor was a half mile away. So, my constant companions were my grandparents and my beloved Uncle Ken and Aunt Ila. A lovely young woman, I adored her. She was a surrogate Mom.

My earliest remembrances of World War II are from 1944-45. I can see my grandfather’s grim face as we listened to Gabriel Heatter - “Ah! There is good news tonight!” on the radio for the latest war update.

One day, an endless stream of planes pulling gliders flew over our farm, heading east, probably to Fort Bragg. From there the 82nd Airborne would become famous for their D-Day battle at Sainte-Mere-Eglise, a Normandy coastal village.

One of the most memorable sites in Normandy is the Church of Sainte-Mere-Eglise [Link]. [i]

Shortly after D-Day, I got another War memory. Aunt Ila had an older brother, Everett. He was in the 82nd Airborne, Glider Group. He was killed at Normandy, and I attended his memorial service, although the significance was lost on a four-year-old.

Years later, Uncle Ken told me about his last meeting with Everett, shortly before the European invasion forces left for England. Everett visited us, and he took Ken aside and said, “I want to tell you goodbye because I won’t be coming back.” Ken asked, “How can you be so sure?” And Everett said, “I’m thirty years old, and old men like me are expendable. They’ve put us in the gliders.” The glider troops had almost no expectation of survival. This fine young man had considerable conviction that he would die, yet he volunteered anyway. Like millions of others, he left the farm or factory or school and did what he saw as his duty.

It was decades before those dark days came to mean much to me. I attended the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day in 1994. It was such a moving experience that I returned to commemorate the 60th anniversary. It was a few days after D-Day and there were no crowds, no celebrations. I walked on Omaha Beach and through the cemetery on the bluff at Colleville-Sur-Mer. I wanted to pay respect to the nine thousand American troops buried on French soil.

A World War II soldier said, “Tell them we gave all our tomorrows, so that they might have theirs.” We are beneficiaries of their sacrifice. We must not forget the debt we owe these troops when they did their duty on “The Longest Day.”

Many Americans today have no sense of history and those dark years when the world stood on the brink of a totalitarian age. They believe our country is not exceptional and feel only disdain for our heritage. While America has had its share of injustices and misdeeds, it is still the country that produced men like Everett who fought to preserve the rights we have today, and often take for granted. They deserve the name that Tom Brokaw gave them, ‘The Greatest Generation.’

Younger generations have my sympathy and understanding. We are all products of the time in which we live and for those under forty years old, what I describe here may as well have happened in the 18th Century for all the relevance they see to their own lives. I hope that by the time they are fifty years old, they will develop a more complete sense of history and have a broader view of their heritage, much as I did as I have traveled down Tobacco Road.

[i] Assigned to secure key targets inland from the Normandy beaches, before dawn on June 6, 15,500 men of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions parachuted into France. Some from the 82nd landed in the town of Sainte-Mere-Eglise. You can read here about their fight and about Private John Steele [Link] whose parachute caught on the church roof. Sainte-Mere-Eglise was the first town in France to be liberated. So grateful, the town people replaced the stained-glass chapel window which had been destroyed with one commemorating their liberators, the Airborne troops.

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