Revisting Gold Beach

Note: I have decided to revisit a "photo-essay" I posted on my Facebook page last year, following a visit to Arromanches-les-Bains in Normandy, the the D-Day landing site known as Gold Beach. What I wrote then was not terribly measured and I don't know if this will be any more so, but it is June 6, 2010, and the day should be marked somehow.

I am a medieval historian, and so loath to comment on topics outside my ken, like World War II. The only other occasion when I have done so was in an earlier blog post, which was not about the war as much as war and its effects and the things you learn in unexpected places. Still, if one has lived the last twenty years as an attentive citizen, one can hardly not be aware of the great interest that has been shown for the event. These thoughts stemmed from a 2009 visit to Arromanches-les-Bains, a site I first visited in 1989 just after graduating from high school. Code-named Gold Beach on D-Day, it was an invasion site taken primarily by British Forces, who were tasked with creating an artificial harbor (which a friend tells me is called a Mulberry harbor). Until Antwerp was liberated, the Mulberry harbor at Arromanches was a primary resupply point for Allied forces in Normandy. The above photo is of a segment of that harbor, still resting on the beach. Segments of the harbor remain in the Channel and are visible on satellite photos.

The most disturbing part of the growth of interest in World War II was the peddling of a triumphalist narrative. It is, indeed, a story that has been crammed down our throats at least since the 1998 publication of Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation and driven home by movies like Saving Private Ryan. Such efforts, which would seem to run counter to the noted reticence veterans of the war consistently show to lionize their efforts, offer us a straightforward good-versus-evil struggle and the triumph of democracy over totalitarianism. This can generally be accomplished only by minimizing the involvement of Stalin's Soviet Union and Chinese Communists under Mao, whose efforts were integral to the Allied victory. How then, in this narrative, can we explain this, for if Stalin and Mao were not totalitarians--though, to be fair, Mao would have to wait a few years--then who is?

The truth seems to be that by constructing a narrative in this fashion, we allow ourselves to duck our measure of responsibility for a war that claimed more than 70 and perhaps as many as 100 million lives. We can claim to have been drawn in by the December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor, but we had always been involved, if only through policies such as Lend-Lease or documents like the so-called "Atlantic Charter." We had sold Japan much of the steel its war machine needed in much the same way that the United Kingdom sold its desert camouflage to Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the years preceding the first Gulf War.

In the end, World War Two was the result of the bad faith of governments throughout the world. That the Allies won is, of course, a good thing for humanity. But that the war had to be fought at this scale, that the threat of German fascism was not strangled in its crib, is evidence of how colossally all the parties fucked up--there is no other way to put it--in the years before the war. We went to war because we had screwed up too badly not to go to war. And, as always, old men far from the battlefield sent young men to die for their mistakes. And, again as always, these young men responded with bravery and with cowardice, with conviction and with doubt, willingly or not. Their sacrifice should be remembered, and it is not my goal to denigrate that, but to point out that they were, at least in part, cleaning up their own mess, as is always the case. One reminder is the refuse of this war, still leaking oily residue over 65 years later. The battlefield is beautiful, and the locals fish for clams in these pools, but the detritus of war still pollutes the beach.

Yet, the uncritical narratives dominate, precisely because they fail to challenge us. And through the efforts of hagiographers like Brokaw, Steven Spielberg, Stephen Ambrose and others, everything is framed by the war. The god-men they describe and portray make the rest of us seem like homunculi by comparison. Their message is disheartening. Never can we rise to such a level of excellence, so we must be content to adore. Was their accomplishment marvelous? Yes. But it was only equal to the size of the mistakes their leaders made. And, of course, it is not the veterans who write and film these masturbatory exercises in hero-worship. For the most part, content with having done their jobs, they attempted to return to the lives they left behind.

Part of what the hagiographers have done stems from a noble source. The World War Two generation was notably silent about their achievement and no one should argue that memory must be preserved. However, we must take the good with the bad. Remnants like these will clutter the beaches long after the last veteran has died.

It is important, however, to resist the simplistic narrative of the war that media and markets attempt to foist on us. Forgetting the complexity of the war, ignoring our own culpability, makes it difficult to avoid the next war. Nothing so big is ever so simple as some would have us think. Monuments like the monstrosity on the National Mall force us into this mold, and it is no coincidence that the chief movers of this projects were the same people selling us the triumphalist story. So the monument becomes more a paean to their own excesses than to the veterans. It belies, in its way, the message they have tried to sell us.

In Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, perhaps the most profound meditation on war ever filmed, the master Shimada Kambei tells the callow swordsman Kikuchiyo that in war only the peasants win. At the end of the film, Kikuchiyo abandons the way of the sword and returns to his peasant roots. Like Cincinnatus, whose example so stirred the Revolutionary generation, this is what the veterans of the war did. Once the artificial harbor and the bridges connecting it to the land had served their purpose, it was abandoned. The people and their need to work and eat remain, their survival a fitting monument. They will outlast anything built by the hand of man.

Nothing beside remains, round the decay
Of that colossal wreck. Boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley