Eighty years ago today, uniformed fighters from Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia and, of course, the United Kingdom and the United States, staged the largest seaborne invasion in history. Today we know it as D-Day.
I reckon that not many of those soldiers, sailors and other fighters who opened the door to liberating Europe from the Nazis are alive today. It seems not so long ago that there were many more survivors—you saw them at Memorial and Veterans’ Day parades and other events—and they weren’t much older than I am now!
Anyway, I am observing this day precisely because I am a (mostly) pacifist: While I understand that Hitler may have been, as Kurt Vonnegut described him, “pure evil” and had to be stopped, I also understand that war is not only about the fighting itself or the ostensible causes; it’s also about the social and economic factors—including tax laws that reward a few people for making war on the planet, if you will. I shudder to think about the lives that have been wasted and ruined—including those of many veterans—as a result.
In other words, ensuring that no veteran wants is one of the things we must do in order to work for peace.
Now that I’ve delivered my message, such as it is, for this day, I am leaving you with images of soldiers who landed on the Normandy beaches with bicycles strapped to their backs. Of course they weren’t going for a pleasant tour in the countryside. They brought those bikes, which folded in the middle, because they could reach places, swiftly and silently, that couldn’t be accessed with motorized vehicles.
