For emotional intensity none of the speeches could compete with the veterans' testimony , writes LARA MARLOWEin Colleville-sur-Mer
NOTHING SUMMED up the day better than Gordon Brown’s Freudian slip: “And so, next to Obama Beach, we join president Obama . . .”
Muffled laughter rippled through the audience of 9,000 at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial. The British prime minister corrected himself, paying tribute “to the spectacular bravery of American soldiers on Omaha Beach, who gave their lives for people whose names they never knew, and whose faces they never saw”.
The event was meant to commemorate the biggest amphibious landing in the history of warfare, when 135,000 allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy, 65 years ago on Saturday. At times it felt more like a rock concert, with US president Barack Obama as superstar.
“People came mostly to see Obama. I’m sorry they don’t think more about the dead,” said Jacques Olivreau (85), the only French soldier who landed on Omaha Beach with US troops.
In nearby Caen, where Obama lunched with French president Nicolas Sarkozy before the ceremony, local authorities put up a hoarding with a photograph of Obama under the words, “Yes we Ca(e)n!”.
When the first ladies, Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni Sarkozy, arrived at the cemetery, hundreds of people stood up, craning to see them, while thousands shouted, “Sit down!”
The US and French presidents mounted the stage with Brown, Prince Charles and Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, but no one doubted the cheering was for Obama.
It was difficult for Obama’s performance to meet such high expectations. Sarkozy, Harper, Brown and Obama delivered their speeches, one after the other, like schoolboys in a debating contest.
After his journey to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Germany, there was a tinge of weariness in Obama’s statement that, “I am not the first American president to come and mark this anniversary, and I likely will not be the last”.
Turning to the 200 aging veterans who sat alongside the leaders on the podium, Obama returned to a favourite theme, the power of human will: “You remind us that, in the end, human destiny is not determined by forces beyond our control. You remind us that our future is not shaped by mere chance or circumstance. Our history has always been the sum total of the choices made and the actions taken by each individual man or woman. It has always been up to us.”
Obama mentioned his grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who arrived on Omaha Beach six weeks after the landings, and his great uncle, Charles Payne, who participated in the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald and who sat at the front beside the first ladies at the ceremony.
Despite Obama’s assertion in a press conference in Caen that “good friends don’t worry about the symbols and the conventions and the protocols”, the impression persisted that he snubbed Sarkozy by refusing to go to the Élysée Palace. The first ladies seemed to get along better, chatting happily at the cemetery. Michelle Obama and daughters Malia (10) and Sasha, who was celebrating her eighth birthday, accepted Bruni Sarkozy’s invitation to lunch at the Élysée yesterday
Brown spoke eloquently of the “new age of peace and union in a Europe that had been torn by centuries of conflict”. For emotional intensity, though, none of the speeches could compete with the testimony of the veterans. Obama told of James Norene, who had parachuted on to the beach 65 years earlier and had visited the cemetery on Friday night “for one last time”, and then died in his sleep.
Retired Brig Gen James W Hoerner, in his 80s, said all 39 men in his infantry platoon died. In the course of the war, which he started as a second lieutenant, 781 men under his orders perished, and he was wounded three times.
Recalling the morning of June 6th, Hoerner said: “We got off the mother ship down to the landing craft. The sea was rough. A couple of guys were lost because they got crushed between the ship and the landing craft.”
“We jumped in water up to our thighs,” recounted H Smith Chumway (87). “Some people sank to the bottom, because they were carrying 90 pounds. There were a lot of mortar shells and bullets coming at us, especially mortars.”
When he reached the bluff where 9,387 US soldiers are now buried, Chumway turned to look at 5,000 ships in the English Channel. Six weeks later, “we started to march towards Paris. A shell blew up and blinded me and killed our tank commander”.
Chumway married his college sweetheart and worked as a rehabilitation councillor for the blind. He and his wife have eight children, 41 grandchildren and 20 great-grandchildren. “Anybody who fights in a war doesn’t ever want to fight again,” he told me. “They want to have peace.”
Should the US be in Iraq and Afghanistan? “No,” the D-Day veteran said, his silver heart, bronze star and legion of honour medals pinned casually to his shirt. “No. I think there’s other ways.”
The cemetery shook as 21 artillery pieces fired a salute. The air pressure changed, and smoke drifted over. A mournful bugle rendition of taps brought tears to many eyes. A dozen fighter jets – French Rafales, British Eurofighters and US F-18s – thundered over, with one US jet peeling away, vertically, in what is known as the missing man formation.