I have come to realize, very deeply, that that moment of D-Day marked a turning point of the twentieth century—it was perhaps the most dramatic moment of the twentieth century, because it enabled the freedom of the world. There’s something sacred about it.1
—CAPTAIN JOSEPH DAWSON,
G Company commander,
US 1st Infantry Division
THE FORTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD TEXAN had added thirty pounds and four inches to his waist since D-Day. It was a sunny, clear day, and he stood with his son, a fourteen-year-old with bright blue eyes, in a fishing boat plowing through the English Channel. Then it appeared: the unmistakable knife-edged outcrop.
“There it is,” said Colonel James Rudder to the boy, Bud. “Pointe du Hoc.”
It was May 1954. Rudder was returning to Normandy for the first time since his Rangers had sacrificed so many lives to scale Pointe du Hoc. He found that the clifftops had barely changed, though the moonscape of craters and ugly, singed earth were now covered in grass. There were no crowds of vacationers, no memorial plaques, no parking lots crammed with tour buses full of patriotic children and grandchildren of the “Greatest Generation.” The heroics at Pointe du Hoc had yet to become legendary, yet to be commemorated adequately. The war was still too close, too painful in the memories of those who had endured those years.
Rudder walked with his son to where he had set up his command post, weaving between the massive shell holes. He finally arrived at the ruins of a concrete blockhouse, open to the Channel winds, its floor still strewn with rubble.
He called to his son.
“I want you to see this.”
The boy came over and followed his father into the concrete command post.
“This is where the shell hit,” said Rudder, pointing to a spot on the ceiling where two steel rods were exposed. “They say it wasn’t from one of our ships, but when you look at the direction, it had to be. The artillery captain, a nice-looking, black-haired boy—I wish I could remember his name—was killed right here. The navy lieutenant, who was spotting with us, fell right here.”2
Rudder pointed to a corner.
“It knocked me over right here.”
Rudder pulled back his coat sleeve, undid his shirt cuff, rolled it back, and showed his forearm. “Right under that,” he said, indicating the red scar, “is a piece of concrete from here . . . You carry it around with you for ten years and you bring it back where it came from.”
“I thought you had two pieces in there?” said Bud.
They explored the concrete ruins further.
“I’ve thought about this a lot,” said Rudder. “The way I pictured it, you could just about reach up and touch the place where the shell hit, and you just about can.”
They moved outside. The boy stepped close to the edge of the cliffs, looking down the ninety feet to a narrow stone beach below.
“Bud!” cried Rudder.
“Yes?”
“Look, son. I want you to keep away from that edge.”
“I’m just looking.”
“You could fall off there, and I’d have to go home and face your mother.”
Ten years had gone fast. Rudder had returned from the war and thrown himself, as so many of his men had, into hard work and raising a family. For six years he had been mayor of the town of Brady, Texas, and had worked as an executive in manufacturing. Then Collier’s magazine had come calling, wanting to do a cover story on him for an issue to commemorate the tenth anniversary of D-Day.
“You think of the wonderful kids you had with you,” Rudder told the reporter as he walked among the grassed-over shell holes and rusted iron and crumbling concrete of the casemates. “You think that if you could have men like that around you in a peacetime world, men as devoted as that, there wouldn’t be anything you couldn’t accomplish.”3
Rudder would prove to be just as effective as a leader away from the battlefield, becoming the most distinguished and trusted president in the history of Texas A&M University. In 1963, five years into his tenure as president, he decided that the university should admit women.4 “If Texas A&M goes on fighting and resisting this,” he declared, “we’ll find in ten years from now that we are still about the same size . . . Now is the time to change and move on.”5 Rudder was right. Sadly, he would die in 1970, at the age of just fifty-nine.
The same year that women were admitted to Texas A&M, Rudder’s former supreme commander, Dwight Eisenhower, returned to Normandy. Over several days in August 1963, he was filmed visiting Pointe du Hoc, Omaha Beach, and the bocage for a CBS special presented by Walter Cronkite. It was impossible not to be deeply moved by the footage of a somber and pensive Eisenhower walking among the seemingly endless rows of white crosses at Colleville-sur-Mer, where some nine thousand American soldiers had been laid to rest. He was shown seated on a wall, studying the graves of the men he had sent into the invasion, less than a hundred yards from where Lieutenant John Spalding had broken off the Easy Red sector of Omaha Beach.
“You knew many hundreds of boys were going to give their lives or be maimed forever,” he told Cronkite. “These men came here . . . to storm these beaches for one purpose only. Not to gain anything for ourselves, not to fulfill any ambitions that America had for conquest, but just to preserve freedom.”6
The next American president to speak with true eloquence and sincerity about the Allied sacrifice in Normandy was Ronald Reagan. At Pointe du Hoc in 1984, to mark the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, Reagan spoke before a group of world leaders as well as survivors from the 5th and 2nd Rangers.
“We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France,” said Reagan, beginning his finest speech as president and the most memorable of any American politician who has ever walked the beaches of Normandy. “The air is soft, but forty years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon.”
Reagan then lauded the veterans, seated in rows facing him.
“These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc,” he declared. “These are the champions who helped free a continent.”
Reagan unveiled two memorials at Pointe du Hoc and reminded the world, then enduring the last decade of the Cold War, that the US had learnt a painful but important lesson in the twentieth century: “It is better to be here ready to protect the peace than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We’ve learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent.”7
The Cold War had ended by 1993, almost fifty years after D-Day, when Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway returned to the Merville Battery, having enjoyed a long postwar career in business. He was filmed meeting his opposite number, the German commander Raimund Steiner, who had fought him on D-Day. It was an uncomfortable encounter. Otway later confessed that he did not have the “guts” to “refuse” the German’s “proffered hand.”8 But he had never forgotten his boys who had been picked off by Steiner’s troops as they had dangled helplessly, trapped by their parachutes, in nearby trees.
It was too simplistic to talk of forgiveness and of moving on. So much had been lost. So much deep hatred had been aroused. For Otway and many of his ilk, the battlefields of Normandy would forever be hallowed ground, a place where young men they had led and loved had given their lives upon their every command. During one return visit, Otway spotted several tourists picnicking near the Merville Battery and insisted they leave the area, declaring, “I don’t like people eating and drinking where my men died.”9
The fiftieth anniversary saw the largest commemoration of D-Day since the war ended. Dozens of veterans who had landed in the first wave returned for the first time to where they had fought hardest when the stakes were highest on arguably the most impactful day in modern history. The 4th Division’s Leonard Schroeder, believed to be the first American infantryman to wade ashore on D-Day, stood once more on the sands of Utah Beach. Schroeder had remained in the army after the war, serving for thirty years, seeing combat in Korea and Vietnam. “I realize that to be the first man ashore is an immense honor,” he told a French magazine, “yet I do not merit it more than anyone else. Five of my men died . . . They alone are the heroes.”10
Atop the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, George Kerchner stood proudly beside one of his sons, as well as other veterans from the 2nd Ranger Battalion and their families. One of Kerchner’s men from D Company told Kerchner’s son how on D-Day he and others had been surrounded and badly outnumbered: “I cried like a baby and your dad held me like a baby.”11
After the war, Kerchner had become an infantry instructor before being discharged with the rank of captain. He returned to his prewar job at Arundel Ice Cream Company and rose quickly through the ranks to become company president. In 1959, his company’s store in the Northwood Plaza Shopping Center, in Maryland, was picketed by African American students protesting segregation. Kerchner told the students they were more than welcome in his store. “I want you to know that you will have as much right to come in here as anyone else,” he said. He sold the company in 1970, and in his retirement he was reportedly “an avid boater and fisherman.”12
The officer who had achieved as much as any man at Pointe du Hoc died in 2012, at the age of ninety-three, a much loved and admired citizen of his Maryland community. “I didn’t think I did anything that heroic,” Kerchner told a reporter before his death. “I knew nobody but the Rangers could have done what we did.”13
A still sprightly Bill Millin, wearing a leather tunic and a green beret, stood close to Pegasus Bridge on June 6, 1994, and in an upbeat brogue told of how he had arrived with Lord Lovat fifty years before. “Lovat was a bit of a critic, so I had to concentrate on my playing,” he remembered with a smile as an incredulous reporter marveled at his story. When asked why the Germans hadn’t shot him as he played, Millin grinned and tapped his head. “The Germans said I was dummkopf—mad,” he explained. “But if I was mad, then Lovat was even more mad!”
Lord Lovat was not in Normandy for the fiftieth anniversary, but from his home in Scotland he spoke on television of how “touch and go” the whole D-Day operation had been. “If we hadn’t gotten a footing that first day,” said Lovat, still pained by his battle wounds yet as elegant and erudite as ever, “the war would have been delayed for a very long time.”14
After the war, Lovat had returned to his 200,000-acre estate, Beaufort, in Scotland, and had devoted himself to breeding shorthorn cattle and improving the forests on his lands. He wrote a scintillating and deeply affecting memoir, March Past, in which he concluded that the “causes of war are falsely represented: its purpose dishonest and the glory meretricious. Yet we remember a challenge to spiritual endurance and the awareness of a common peril endured for a common end.” It was the sacred duty of the warriors who had survived the “shattering experience” of combat in Normandy to “enshrine the memory of those brave men who did not return.”15
Lovat’s last years were plagued by tragedy, an utterly undeserved fate.16 Though he was blessed with good looks, great charm, and courage, the gods cruelly conspired against him at the end, as if to remind other mortals that no men are given everything. His youngest son, Andrew Fraser, was killed by a buffalo on safari in Africa. His eldest son, Simon, died of a heart attack just two weeks later, and after his death it was reported that he had “left large debts on the Beaufort estates that [had] been for so long associated with the name of Lovat.” The seventeenth Lord Lovat died not long after, on March 16, 1995. He was survived by two beautiful daughters and his wife, Rosamond, who had waited so patiently for him to return from the greatest commando raids of World War II.17 A grief-stricken Bill Millin, who would pass away in 2010, played his bagpipes at Lovat’s funeral.
In 1998, the blockbuster film Saving Private Ryan brought international focus once more to the heroism shown on Omaha Beach. The opening scenes in particular were widely praised by surviving veterans. So visceral was the re-creation of the slaughter, some men were in fact thrust back into the cauldron of war. “It was very realistic,” said Dan Farley, of the 5th Ranger Battalion, “but what is missing are the smells. Smells of burnt flesh and blood, so much blood. You never forget those smells . . . I never understood why I ran on the beach with a man on each side of me and how they could go down but not me. I always wondered why I was spared instead of someone else.” When asked what had made the difference between success and failure on D-Day, Farley stressed that during the most critical combat of modern times it was the “heart and mind” that had mattered most.18
Arguably the finest British glider pilot of World War II, Jim Wallwork returned to Normandy several times after the war, joining comrades at Pegasus Bridge and raising a glass of champagne at precisely 12:15 A.M. each June 6 to celebrate their extraordinary exploits. He had emigrated to Canada after the war, during which he’d flown in every major Allied airborne operation, and had never piloted a plane again. “We were of that daft age where you believe that you are invincible and are going to live forever—that if a bloke’s going to be shot it’s going to be the one next to you,” he said. “We had not the slightest doubt we were going to pull it off. There’s so much going on and there’s the fear of what’s coming next. There’s so much excitement which you repress. It is only afterwards that you think how lucky we were to survive.”19
On one return visit, Wallwork donated his Distinguished Flying Medal to the museum near Pegasus Bridge where Bill Millin’s pipes are also on display today, explaining, “I thought it would be better in the museum than in the top drawer of my dresser under my socks.”20 Wallwork died at the age of ninety-three in 2013. One of his final requests was to have his ashes spread near Pegasus Bridge.21
On the seventieth anniversary of D-Day, in 2014, very few men were still alive from the first wave. Sons and daughters were often contacted to speak to the still fascinated press about their fathers. The son of Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis, Britain’s sole D-Day recipient of the Victoria Cross, echoed other children of the first wave in stressing that his father had avoided talking in detail about combat: “If it was pigeons you wanted to talk about, you were fine, but not the war.”
As a boy, Brian Hollis had gone to Buckingham Palace with his father, a “pleasant, quiet man, and a very good father,” to watch him receive the Victoria Cross from King George. “There was my dad, in front of us, talking to the King,” recalled Brian, “and he turned round and waved at me to come up. I went up to the stage and the King said, ‘You must be very proud of your father.’”
After the war, Stanley Hollis had struggled to find work in grim, austerity-ridden Britain, where rationing continued until 1954. He had reportedly been “reduced to supporting his wife and two children by pushing trolleys of scrap into a blast furnace” but had stubbornly refused to accept government help or even to claim his war pension: “I don’t need charity handouts.”22 He had eventually been able to support his family by working as a landlord in a pub in his native Middlesbrough. Drunks who caused trouble were quickly dealt with. Regulars recalled Hollis sometimes standing behind the bar of his pub, appropriately called the Green Howard, pulling pints as blood seeped from old wounds to his feet.
Like Terence Otway, Hollis could not forgive or forget. “Although I am not proud of it,” he admitted, “I find it impossible to treat a man as an enemy one minute and then shake his hand. I saw the results of too many of their atrocities ever to trust, or like, the Germans again.”23 Hollis died in 1972, aged fifty-nine, from a stroke. His Victoria Cross was found in a drawer among some discarded bottle tops.24 “If I hadn’t done the things I did,” he had often insisted, “somebody else would have done them.”25 He just happened to have done them first.
In 2018, Léon Gautier stood outside the No. 4 Commando Museum, in Ouistreham, surrounded by grateful visitors from the US and Britain who had come to honor him. He was one of only five surviving French commandos out of 177 who had landed in the first wave on D-Day, just a few hundred yards away from the museum on Sword Beach. After surviving the Battle of Normandy, he had kept his promise to his English girlfriend, Dorothy, and they had gotten married and then moved to France, where they eventually settled, of all places, in the seaside town of Ouistreham, which Gautier had liberated on D-Day.
Each June 6 for several decades, Gautier has left his modest home, half a mile from Sword Beach, and journeyed to a memorial where he has laid a wreath in honor of his fallen brothers. It is time now, he says, for a new generation to carry the flame of remembrance, and to ensure that Europe is never again enslaved, that it remain at peace, after almost seventy-five years—by far the longest period in its history. Time now for others to be “vigilant.”26