Opinion: When D-Day veterans are gone, will we remember?

I’ve tried to put myself in the place of those who listened to radio reports 80 years ago.

If you search enough on the internet, you can find a recording of the complete CBS radio broadcast from D-Day, June 6, 1944, beginning about an hour after the network’s news team came on the air shortly after midnight to share German radio reports about an invasion.

The commentators caution repeatedly that these reports may be nothing but a ploy by Nazi leaders to lure local underground fighters from their hiding places and into the open, where they could be destroyed. And yet their voices carry a hint of hope and excitement. They seem happy to go without sleep for this.

It’s 3:32 a.m., eastern war time, when the broadcast cuts to a terse statement out of London by Col. R. Ernest Dupuy of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. “Under the command of General Eisenhower, Allied naval forces, supported by strong air forces, began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France,” he said.

“This,” a CBS reporter tells listeners, “means invasion.”

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At one point, a commentator observes how lights can be seen coming on in windows around New York as people become aware of the news.

I’ve tried to put myself there. Most likely, each light represented a son, a brother, a father or a husband and the dread each of their relatives felt, wondering about a distant unknown that loomed as thick as the darkness of that predawn morning.

For days now, France has been in the middle of a long celebration for the few surviving soldiers from that day. To us, it can seem so inevitable. This is the 80th anniversary of the invasion that changed the course of World War II and began the liberation of Europe, including my mother’s family in Nazi-occupied Norway. But back then, nothing was certain. Death seemed to lurk around endless corners.

All my relatives who huddled in that little apartment in Oslo are gone now, including my grandfather, who secretly served in Norway’s underground. I’m fairly sure they were listening to BBC reports on a radio they had secretly kept despite Nazi orders. My early life was saturated with stories about those dreadful years, from the heroics to the tragedies.

But now, as the people who lived through it all have dwindled to a few, I have begun to share the worry an aging former mayor of Ste.-Mère-Église in France shared this week with The New York Times. Will people remember?

“It’s a question we’ve asked ourselves for a long time,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t know.”

The answer seems more critical than ever now that, as NPR reported, less than 1% of the 16.4 million Americans who served in that war remain alive. It seems urgent as the world darkens abroad once more and as American politics begin to canker with hate.

Will we remember the selfless sacrifices of people like Frank DeVita, who joined the Navy during his senior year of high school after Pearl Harbor was attacked? As the Deseret News reported last year, he was on a troop transport ship delivering men to Omaha Beach 80 years ago, at the age of 19. His job was to lower the ramp that would allow the soldiers to exit the ship and run onto the beach.

But as the boat approached the shore, bullets began beating the outside of the raised ramp like the clacking of a typewriter. He froze, he recalls in videos everyone should watch. “I figured … when I drop that there ramp, the bullets that are hitting the ramp are going to come into the boat,” he said.

Finally, after the coxswain yelled and swore at him, he lowered the ramp and watched as the first dozen or so men were cut down like wheat.

After returning to the main ship, covered in blood and vomit, he thought of how he didn’t want to return. But then, he thought how he would feel if someone else went in his place and was killed. He could never live with himself, he said. So, he ended up going on 14 more trips to the beach that day in boats filled with soldiers.

Will we remember people like Earl Howard Clements of Cottonwood Heights, who told the Deseret News he had been instructed that half the men in his group were going to die.

“They told us that. But everybody went anyway,” he said.

George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

No, we can’t feel the angst of those who listened to the radio 80 years ago, or of those who sacrificed everything in France. But we can’t afford to forget what we owe them.

Today, part of Europe is again at war. China and Iran are engaging in belligerent behavior.

The 80th anniversary of D-Day is likely the last time a round-number commemoration will be celebrated with actual participants from that day in attendance.

When they are gone, will what they did live on?