On D-Day

June 6, 1944. 72 years ago now. This was the day, from what I've read, that really turned the tide in the European war. I recently read Mr Brown's War, which is a series of war diaries a man named Richard Brown kept. He lived with his family in Ipswitch, not very far from London, and worked as an engineering draughtsman at an engineering firm. (He was not "called up," despite being in one of the older age classes that could have been, because his work was deemed essential for the war - one of the things he worked on were dehumidifiers (? I don't know) for submarines).

Mr Brown's War is an interesting book. I admit I found the Home Front stuff more compelling than the catalog of battles he heard about "on the wireless." But D-Day was a big deal, and it did seem like the beginning of the Axis powers' fall - about a year later, the war in Europe was over.

The Guardian recently published a series of photos, then and now showing the changes since 1944. Some of them, like the church that has been repaired since, are heartening. It's also interesting - in some of them all you see is the mass of soldiers or materiel, but then in the current photo you can see the buildings, or in a couple cases, a peaceful seashore scene.

It's kind of mind-boggling to someone of my generation - where wars or "police actions" have been mostly small and localized (Grenada, Bosnia, Gulf Wars 1 and 2) and staffed by an all-volunteer military, just how huge the scale of this event was. I've been told that most families in the US had someone in the military, and there was conscription. (In Mr Brown's War, one of his concerns is how his wife and children would cope if he got called up - oh, he was willing to go if called, but he felt concern about how his family would manage). Somewhere over 200,000 of the Allied forces were killed during the Battle of Normandy, which is also a mind-boggling number.

I remember hearing some about the war from older relatives. In my own family, there was no one "close" in my dad's family who fought (A couple of cousins did, but I am not sure where they served) and in my mom's family, she had a somewhat older brother who was in the Navy, but he fought in the Pacific front. (she has, and I hope to inherit, a pendant of a silver cross set inside a glass heart - apparently he managed to machine it out of a silver dime and glass from a shattered plane window). I actually heard more "home front" descriptions, because my grandmothers lived that. (Food rationing, dealing with limitations on travel, collections of materials for the war effort - I think they both lived too far from the coast to have much in the way of invasion worries).

I wonder if in the UK and northern France there is more memory of this than there is here? They were more directly involved (and apparently there was some resentment about the Americans' relatively late entry into the war - or at least that seemed to be hinted at in Mr Brown's War). I know World War I is still remembered to a greater degree over there than here. I don't know if it's that Americans are more forgetful of history or if, because we never truly faced an invasion threat like Britain did, we don't memorialize it more. And I suspect our collective memory of these milestones to dwindle as the last fighters of WWII continue to die off.

I once said that I don't think people who don't know history exactly repeat it, but I think they are in danger of making similar mistakes as were made in the past if they pretend that either (a) human nature has gotten much better in recent years* or (b) there aren't patterns that can be seen from the past.

(* Look at the Pauline letters. Many of the problems faced in first-century AD churches are the very same problems we struggle with in congregations today. I don't know whether to be cheered by that -"We haven't got much worse, after all" - or frustrated - "Have we learned NOTHING in 2000 years?")