This simple fact of my own fortunate existence is brought home to me at each commemoration of the D-Day landing at Normandy, France, and of the other momentous dates that followed in the bloody campaign of Europe's liberation from Nazi control. Many are the ways produced by natural and human history to shorten lives before their natural span, but taking part in the justly famous invasion of June 6, 1944 was surely one the most conspicuous of these. As commentators pointed out this year, the world will probably never see its like again.
And, as historian David Christopher pointed out in the first sentence of his recent moving and informative essay on D-Day in the New York Times: "Most of the men in the first wave never stood a chance."
And as other deeply reflective accounts of the deadly start of the great invasion pointed out, the companies and battalions of infantry chosen for this first wave knew that they had been chosen to be human sacrifices to a battle plan that required a frontal assault on fixed defenses long in preparation. Still, these men climbed out of their landing craft and slogged toward their deaths.
Here is Christopher's account of those moments of the invasion:
"Concentrated in concrete pill boxes, nearly 2,000 German defenders lay in wait. The landing ramps slapped down into the surf, and a catastrophic hail of gun fire erupted from the bluffs. The ensuing slaughter was merciless."
The enduring courage of soldiers facing the strong possibility of violent extinction is one of the sad miracles of human existence. War is nothing without it.
The best, and best known, of American correspondents reporting the Second World War to the homefront, Ernie Pyle detailed the deadly intensity of Germany's defensive wall on the Normandy beaches: concrete walls, immense ditches, barbed wire, mines, big guns, hidden machine gun nests, and many armed veteran infantrymen.
And still, Pyle pointed out, after paying the cruel price exacted by such well prepared defenses, "we got on."
As Christopher points out in his piece in the Times, Pyle, who was on the beach by the second day, also wrote very frankly about the cost of the battle and the heroism the soldiers had displayed. The bodies he discovered sleeping in the sand and floating in the water would not wake up to celebrate a hard-won victory.
A current source reports this accounting for that first-day's fighting: 4,400 men died on the Allied side; 1,000 German deaths; civilian casualties estimated at 3,000.
And that was only the first of many deadly days to follow. Pyle continued to provide readers back home with concrete accounts of the conditions of battle and the cruel costs of the war in France. Though Allied armies advanced, the costs mounted steadily in a campaign that lasted almost a year before the liberation of Paris, the recapture of the remainder of France, the breaching of the German border, and eventually the German surrender on V-E day in May of 1945. Before that termination was reached, Pyle announced to his readers that he was leaving France: "I've had it... I've had all I can take."
All of this has a personal resonance for me, as it must for many Americans.
My father, Alva J. Knox, missed being part of that invasion and the costly slog to victory on the Western front, even though he had enlisted in the US Army in 1942. He wore corrective lenses and by Army standards then his vision wasn't judged strong enough to place him in a combat unit. Instead he was given the job of helping to process other recruits, from training to unit assignment. Then, some time in 1944, as the war persisted, demanding more and more soldiers for larger and larger armies, the US Army lowered some of its physical standards and concluded that someone with Dad's vision could be assigned to a combat unit after all.
His regiment was trained for combat and sent to England, to be prepared there for transport to the front lines.
By this time, late in the year 1944, the summer invasion of northern France had taken place and the Allied armies had driven deep into the country. But when bad weather grounded their air force, depriving the Allies of a major advantage, German forces launched the counterattack that would lead famously to the Battle of the Bulge.
As that battle raged, Dad's regiment was loaded onto three transport vessels to cross the English Channel and join the armies battling in France.
Then a cruel fate intervened. While Allied naval forces believed they had eliminated the German U-boat threat by this late date, apparently one enemy submarine had escaped detection. It torpedoed and sank one of three transport vessels as the ship neared the French coast. Attempts at rescuing the men forced to abandon ship were stymied by poor communications and a lack of available help. It was New Year's Eve; coastal commanders were off at parties. And winter in the North Atlantic is a swift executioner; cold water, brutal weather. Almost no one survived the sinking.
The consequence, as my father pointed out to me -- he was in his late seventies then, and this was the only time he would ever speak at length about his wartime experiences -- was that his regiment was now judged undersized and a poor fit to commit to a raging battle. Instead of being sent to the front lines, the diminished regiment was sent to man the holding position around the "Nice Triangle" and pin down the German force that was still holding that city and its port for use by the German Navy.
In his understated manner, Dad pointed out that he had been lucky to escape two bullets: he was not on the ship that sank on that tragic night -- a disaster, as he also knew, the Army kept secret during the war: He showed me the newspaper clipping that reported this story after the was over. And he and his comrades were never sent into the raging, uncertain Battle of the Bulge.
Fortunate, indeed, were the surviving members of this unit not to be sent straight from a training base to a desperate battle. As I know from reading accounts of the war on the European front that inexperienced American forces tended to suffer high casualties in their first weeks of action. Apparently it took some time and experience to learn to keep your head down, dig your foxholes deep, and be ever on the alert for signs of trouble.
As I said above, and as Dad implied (but felt no need to point out), my siblings and I were fortunate that our father was one of the veterans who returned home from the European Theater after the heavy fighting of the campaign of 1944-45. Sent to the South of France instead, his platoon encountered a German patrol on at least one occasion, when Dad fired his weapon and shot a rifle from the hands of a German soldier. The standard German-made infantry rifle became a war souvenir, stored in the basement, and one of the touchstones of my youth.
The other, broader memory of Dad's war was his service in the Army of Occupation that remained in Europe for the most of the following year. His regiment was quartered in Salzburg, Austria, Mozart's birthplace. Dad showed me the programs from the concerts he attended during that time. And the copies of the GI newspaper that continued to be published then. I was in the newspaper business then, and admired the standards of composition, layout and cartooning these period pieces had been able to maintain.
I believe that my father fought in a war that -- when it knocked hard on the doorway of his young manhood -- had to be fought. The only good wars are those that are prevented, but by 1942, it was too late to do anything but pay the terrible price demanded by the dire circumstances of a world war raging in both Europe and Asia for the restoration of some form of international order and peace.
I honor his service and, again, recognize how fortunate my family is he survived. The cemeteries in Normandy and throughout France and the rest of Europe are eloquent testimony of the price humanity pays when disasters of our own making pull down the houses of friendship and justice.
I faced somewhat similar circumstances in my own youth, but the war in Vietnam that came my generation's way need never have taken place, and I stand by my decision to avoid taking part in it. My father was of a similar opinion -- at least in the matter of my possible participation in that war -- and maintained a keen interest in my deferred draft status.
Wars -- my father's, and all others -- continue to disturb and intrigue me, as they have throughout my life. I can seldom pass up a story, or newspaper article, about one. It as if we are all survivors, connected by guilt and mere humanity to all those dead and heroic soldiers, to the unheroic ones as well -- those who ran from sound gunfire (as I can imagine myself doing) along with those who advanced bravely toward it.
Years ago I wrote a published story about my father that dwelled in part on his military career. Later I wrote a poem about the terrible fate that befell a large part of his regiment on their way to join the bloody battles in France, which I read recently to an audience. D-Day was coming up, and people applauded.
But, obviously, the subject is not exhausted, and never will be. I have accepted and stand by my own choices. And I am grateful for the choices made by my father, and my uncles, that helped preserve a world worth living in for all of us. But I am desperately unhappy about contemporary America's apparent willingness to throw away the gifts that were so dearly purchased for us.
After so many millennia of human dominance on Earth, we have still to address the problem of how to live together without succumbing again, and again, to the communal madness of a vast internecine blood-letting.
I hope we get there. I hope the sacrifice of the fallen may someday prove a gift we are ready to accept.
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