Time is going slowly again,” an officer wrote in his diary 80 years ago this month, on the eve of the great battle that would tear the guts out of Nazi Germany. “The days drag on endlessly.” There were no letters from home, and he worried an argument was brewing with his wife. “I can be very tolerant,” he reflected phlegmatically, “because we’ll soon be in battle, and I’ll forget everything”. Then, just days after the landings on Normandy, the soldier disappeared from history—one of eight million Soviets who fell on the Eastern Front.
European and American leaders gathered last week to mark the 80th anniversary of the Allied landings of 1944, when 150,000 soldiers from the United States, Britain, Canada, and France began the long, bloody march that would lead them to Berlin.
The solemn commemoration of what came to be known as ‘The Longest Day’ is a useful prism to examine how power shapes and manipulates historical memory. There was a notable omission from the guest list: President Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation were excluded from the commemoration because of the war in Ukraine. Instead, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attended, to illustrate “how the landings resonate with the just struggle that the Ukrainian nation is waging today”.
“Freedom is worth it, democracy is worth it, America is worth it, the world is worth it,” US President Joseph Biden said in a speech valorising the sacrifices of soldiers in both wars.
Liberal-democratic values, though, didn’t drive the soldiers who destroyed Nazi Germany. Even as Allied troops fought their way off the beaches in Normandy, 1.5 million Soviet troops launched a massive assault on the Third Reich’s Army Group Centre, destroying 28 of its 34 divisions before arriving at the gates of Berlin.
“German armed forces’ losses to war’s end numbered 13,488,000 men, 75 percent of the mobilised forces and 46 percent of the 1939 male population of Germany,” the historian David Glantz recorded. “Of these, almost 9,000,000 fell in the East. The stark inscription, ‘Died in the East,’ that is carved on countless thousands of headstones in scores of German cemeteries bears mute witness to the carnage.”
The country which, more than any other, sacrificed to win the Second World War is now excluded from the telling of its story—providing an education into the abuse of history to serve power.
The politics of Normandy
“Formal ceremonies should be avoided,” General Dwight Eisenhower ordered in a terse message to Allied troops in Europe on the first anniversary of the Normandy landings. Nazi Germany had surrendered a month earlier, but soldiers continued to fight and die in the Pacific theatre. Five years passed before a formal celebration was organised, historian Kate Delaney noted, involving a local bugle corps, two local girls who laid wreaths on the beaches, while bombers flew overhead firing rockets and dropping flowers.
Even as the commemoration took place, the war in Korea had begun, pitting the leaders of the anti-Nazi alliance against each other. In 1952, Lieutenant-General Matthew Ridgway, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and a D-Day veteran warned of the rise of “a new and more fearful totalitarianism.”
“We will gather the strength we have pledged to one another and set it before our people and our lands as a protective shield,” Ridgway said in words that closely anticipated Biden’s speech.
Even though the Irish-American journalist Cornelius Ryan’s 1959 best-seller, The Longest Day, enshrined the Normandy landings in public memory, major anniversaries of the operation did not draw American presidents, Delaney observed. Lyndon Johnson, mired in the Vietnam War and racial conflict at home, did not attend the 20th anniversary. Richard Nixon was facing calls for his impeachment at the time of the 25th anniversary in 1969.
Timed to coincide with morning television shows in the US, however, the 40th anniversary of the Normandy landings provided a theatrical stage for President Ronald Reagan to showcase his Cold War vision. “Soviet troops that came to the centre of this continent did not leave when peace came,” Reagan said in a famous speech. “They’re still there, uninvited, unwanted, unyielding, almost 40 years after the war.”
“We look for some sign from the Soviet Union,” Reagan went on, “that they are willing to move forward, that they share our desire and love for peace, and that they will give up the ways of conquest.”
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The war as kitsch
The age of television transforms all things into kitsch: Four years before Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) restored Normandy in the consciousness of the post-Cold War generation. In 1994, President Bill Clinton sailed across the English Channel in a faux flotilla, escorted by restored period aircraft. This reconstruction of the Normandy landings, staged for its 50th anniversary that year, was meant to signal that military force was a necessary instrument for protecting democracy and liberalism.
“We are the children of your sacrifice,” Clinton told veterans of the battle. “The flame of your youth became freedom’s lamp, and we see its light reflected in your faces still, and in the faces of your children and grandchildren.”
Ten years later, in 2004, President George W Bush went one better, ensuring the attendance of Germany’s chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, together with the new Russia’s Putin. The Cold War had been won, Bush used the commemoration to signal, and democracy secured across a new, expanded West, But the new world had to fight wars, too, whether against the jihadists of al-Qaeda, or totalitarian regimes like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Saving Private Ryan’s star, Tom Hanks, together with Spielberg, mingled with the crowds and ageing veterans. This gesture left little doubt that the film was intended as an answer to the ethical questions swirling around Western hegemony and the Global war on terror.
And in 2014, at the 70th anniversary of the landings, German Chancellor Angela Merkel famously shook hands with Putin, as they began secret diplomatic negotiations over Russia’s invasion of Donbas. The meetings would lead, in 2017, to the Minsk Agreements, which saw Russia and Ukraine agree to direct talks to end their conflict.
From the failure of the Minsk Agreements, French diplomat Marie Dumoulin noted, Europe and the West learned that power and the balance of force mattered in the post-Cold War world, just as it had in the build-up to the Second World War. Ejecting Putin from Normandy is one way of building public consensus around this learning.
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Manufacturing history
The idea that the sacrifices made in the Second World War saved humankind is true: Nazi Germany constituted a distilled, industrial form of evil. Yet, to pretend the war was fought to build democracy is a self-serving fiction. The Soviet Union dismantled German death camps but ran its own system of Gulags that claimed millions of lives. The US was an Apartheid nation, and Britain’s Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was an unrepentant defender of imperialism. These truths, though, are not allowed to intrude on the invention of Normandy as a war for freedom.
French intellectuals, in a letter demanding that Russia be excluded from last month’s commemoration, noted that the country was not the only representative of the fallen soldiers of the Soviet Union. Large numbers of soldiers from Ukraine, they noted, had also died in the war against the Nazis, like Marshal Andrey Yeryomenko, who helped defeat Germany at Stalingrad.
Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Georgian, Turkmen, Baltic, and Belarusians all fought alongside Russians: Fifteen nations, after all, emerged from the Soviet Union’s rubble.
This was also true, though, in 2004 and 2019. Then, Russia was seen as a partner in the European geopolitical project. Ejecting Putin from this year’s commemoration isn’t only an act of protest against his war in Ukraine. It is also an act of historical fiction-writing, built around the lie that the war on Nazi Germany was one of universal liberal values against tyranny.
Fiction-writing isn’t, of course, a Western sin. The soldiers who fell in Kargil are hailed by politicians, but they show no similar interest in assigning responsibility for the many errors of military and political judgement that sent young men to their deaths. The war in Bangladesh continues to be assigned very different meanings by Hindu nationalists, Islamists, and secularists—each censoring important parts of the story. There has been no accounting, either, for the disastrous misjudgements that led up to the 1962 war.
Like all rites of remembrance, Normandy seeks to tell a story that makes its audience feel good about itself. Nations that choose the comfort of the fairy tale over the often-painful self-examination demanded by real history risk paying the inevitable price of self-delusion.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)
Love this paragraph:
“Yet, to pretend the war was fought to build democracy is a self-serving fiction. The Soviet Union dismantled German death camps but ran its own system of Gulags that claimed millions of lives. The US was an Apartheid nation, and Britain’s Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was an unrepentant defender of imperialism. These truths, though, are not allowed to intrude on the invention of Normandy as a war for freedom.”