June 6, 1944, was D-Day, “the largest amphibious invasion in history since King Xerxes’s 480 b.c. combined sea and land descent into Greece,” as Victor Davis Hanson has noted. The Allied effort to free Western Europe from Nazi subjugation began on the beaches of Normandy, stormed by thousands of brave soldiers, many of whom perished in the act. It was ultimately successful, though that success was no sure thing; not for nothing did Dwight Eisenhower, then Supreme Allied Commander, prepare a speech in the event of its failure.
Forty years later, Ronald Reagan became the first president to speak at Normandy. To honor the occasion more broadly, Reagan chose to focus on “the boys of Pointe du Hoc,” choosing the “lonely windswept point on the northern shores of France” as both the setting and the main subject of his address. This redoubt was of great significance to the day’s fighting. As Senator Tom Cotton has explained:
Visitors to the Pointe rarely fail to comment on its imposing terrain — a sheer white cliff that juts dagger-like into the sea. The German battery atop the Pointe was no less imposing. Pointe du Hoc was a stronghold of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, a series of fortifications and obstacles built by slave labor to repel an Allied invasion of Europe. Neutralizing Pointe du Hoc was a key American objective in the run-up to the invasion, both because it was the most powerful gun battery in Normandy and because of its critical placement directly between the American landing sites. If the six German guns had roared on D-Day they could have multiplied American casualties on Utah and Omaha beaches.
It fell to the 225 soldiers of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, 62 of whom were in the audience for the speech, to take the cliff — one of countless feats of heroism during the entirety of the campaign. “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.” Reagan singled them out not to exclude these other feats but to represent them:
All of these men were part of a roll call of honor with names that spoke of a pride as bright as the colors they bore: the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, Poland’s 24th Lancers, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, the Screaming Eagles, the Yeomen of England’s armored divisions, the forces of Free France, the Coast Guard’s “Matchbox Fleet” and you, the American Rangers.
Why did they fight? “It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love.” And:
You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One’s country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you.
Reagan spoke as a contemporary of these men, involved in the war effort though he did not himself fight. World War II was a formative experience and memory for their generation. Now, that generation is dwindling; Reagan himself died 18 years ago. In another speech by a man who would be president, a young Abraham Lincoln spoke of how losing the memory of significant occasions presents a challenge to the perpetuation of American institutions:
I do not mean to say, that the scenes of the revolution are now or ever will be entirely forgotten; but that like every thing else, they must fade upon the memory of the world, and grow more and more dim by the lapse of time. In history, we hope, they will be read of, and recounted, so long as the bible shall be read; — but even granting that they will, their influence cannot be what it heretofore has been. Even then, they cannot be so universally known, nor so vividly felt, as they were by the generation just gone to rest. At the close of that struggle, nearly every adult male had been a participator in some of its scenes. The consequence was, that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son or brother, a living history was to be found in every family — a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds received, in the midst of the very scenes related — a history, too, that could be read and understood alike by all, the wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned. — But those histories are gone. They can be read no more forever. They were a fortress of strength; but, what invading foeman could never do, the silent artillery of time has done; the leveling of its walls. They are gone. — They were a forest of giant oaks; but the all-resistless hurricane has swept over them, and left only, here and there, a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage; unshading and unshaded, to murmur in a few gentle breezes, and to combat with its mutilated limbs, a few more ruder storms, then to sink, and be no more.
Such is the position we are now in. So what can be done? We would do well to recall the sacrifices of our forebears, through tribute, memory, instruction, and perpetuation of what they fought for, as D-Day itself fades from living recollection.