COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France—The first thing you notice, at the end of the narrow roads that lead to this precipice, is how peaceful this place is. The cliffs are thick with rough green vegetation and drop down—sharply, then more gradually—to a Prussian-blue sea and a windswept beach. Omaha Beach.
The morning I went, the sun was bright, and a few people were walking on the sand with a dog. I could see them from a lookout on the pathway to the https://www.abmc.gov/cemeteries-memorials/europe/normandy-american-cemetery" rel="nofollow - - Boys of Pointe du Hoc” speech at the 40th anniversary in 1984, at the peak of the Cold War, to https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/06/remarks-president-obama-70th-anniversary-d-day-omaha-beach-normandy" rel="nofollow - But something else will be different too: Ceremonies are held every five years, and this will likely be the last time D-Day veterans will attend. It’s hard not to see this year’s ceremony as the end of a cycle of history—one that began with the Allies, led by the United States, turning the course of war here in Normandy and ended with the president of “America First,” who has made questioning the transatlantic alliance a pillar of his presidency.
“I always liken D-Day at 75 to 1938 in Gettysburg,” says Robert Dalessandro, the deputy secretary of the https://www.abmc.gov/" rel="nofollow - - to inaugurate a memorial there. Invoking Abraham Lincoln, he spoke before veterans of the North and the South about how he was “thankful that they stand together under one flag now.” At the time, FDR knew that Civil War veterans would not live much longer, Dalessandro told me, adding, “In my heart, I know this is the last time we’re going to get D-Day veterans to this ceremony.” (This year, he said, about 35 D-Day veterans will attend.)
I had taken a strange, solitary pilgrimage here to begin to comprehend what had happened on these beaches in June 1944 after General Dwight D. Eisenhower—briefed on the weather and the winds and the tides and the tiny window in which such a massive, complex operation of air and sea and land and 150,000 troops could take place—gave his now-famous response, after less than a minute of reflection: “ https://www.abmc.gov/multimedia/videos/ok-lets-go" rel="nofollow - Anyone who has ever traversed this stretch of Normandy, the coast as it winds its way from Omaha Beach west toward Cherbourg, and understood the topography—the cliffs and the precious few routes inland meant the Allies couldn’t bomb heavily without risking being stranded on the beach—anyone who has ever set foot here comes away with two questions: How did these men pull this off? And what would have happened if they hadn’t?
Consider how many tens of thousands of individual decisions were necessary to achieve the cumulative effect of breaching the German defenses so enough Allied troops could pour into Europe to defeat the Nazis. At Omaha, the troops traversed more than 200 yards of beach, then had to scale 35 to 60 yards of cliffs, all while under enemy fire. Before the invasion, the Allies organized a https://www.history.com/news/d-day-normandy-wwii-facts" rel="nofollow - - wrote . “Everyone agreed that the beach was a stinker and it would be a great pleasure to get the hell out of here sometime. Then there was the usual inevitable comic American conversation: ‘Where’re you from?’ This always fascinates me; there is no moment when an American does not have time to look for someone who knows his hometown.”
In all, about 225,000 service members were killed or wounded or went missing in Normandy from June to August 1944, including 134,000 Americans and 91,000 Britons, Canadians, and Poles, as well as 18,000 French civilians. The Germans lost more than 400,000 soldiers in Normandy. In La Cambe, inland from Utah Beach, I visited a https://www.european-traveler.com/france/visit-germany-military-cemetery-la-cambe-normandy/" rel="nofollow -