They Gave Their Today

Rightly do D-Day and the Normandy beach landings grip the imagination. Its scale was immense: it was the largest seaborne invasion in history involving thousands of boats, ships and aircraft and around 160,000 troops from the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Greece, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. (If I have left out any nation, please correct me in the comments’ section below.)

Psychologically, D-Day’s success was compensation. For Britain, it reversed the humiliation of Dunkirk; for France, whose Resistance’s campaign of sabotage made the invasion easier, it was liberation’s beginning.

There is something pointedly incongruous too about D-Day’s setting. In his poem Spring Offensive (1918), Wilfred Owen’s narrator observes the paradox of a bloody advance against enemy lines across a ‘warm field’ of ‘buttercups’ whose ‘gold’ has stuck to boots. Similarly, twenty-six years later Allied troops traversed under fire beaches that were picked by military planners for their breadth, but which now draw tourists in their thousands to dig in the sand and swim in the waters where many bodies once lay and floated. Later, they would battle across Normandy’s meadows studded with burgundy pin cushion flowers, their Churchills, Cromwell and Shermans crushing the stubborn hedgerows.

D-Day has been subject to wisely respectful revisionism. A good example is Henry Getley’s recent article for The Conservative Woman. Getley recognises the Normandy offensive’s great significance, but reminds us of the other offensives that were simultaneously playing their part too in Nazism and Fascism’s demise, such as the Allied invasion of Italy, the defeat of Japan in Papua New Guinea by American and Australian troops, and the Red Army’s Operation Bagration that was driving the Germans out of Poland and Lithuania.

Getley also describes the success of what has become known as the Forgotten Army. This was General Slim’s 14th Army whose Indian and British troops dealt out crushing defeats to the Japanese at the battles of Imphal and Kohima, and began Burma’s liberation from the Japanese in the same month as Allied troops were fighting in Normandy. Though eclipsed by D-Day in the popular imagination, Slim and his troops’ courage is commemorated annually through Remembrance Sunday’s use of the epitaph engraved on the 2nd British Division’s memorial in Kohima’s military cemetery. I am sure this stanza is hair-raisingly familiar to you:

‘When You Go Home

Tell Them of Us and Say

For Your Tomorrow

We Gave Our Today.’

The Burmese Campaign is personally resonant to me as I am old enough to have been taught at primary school by one of its veterans. Mr P as I shall call him was, with the exception of a Geordie brute who taught me Maths, the strictest teacher I ever had. I hope it is not a crashing cliché to say that he managed his classroom with the close-eyed constancy of a parade ground NCO. Before my class entered the room, we had to stand in silence in alphabetical order. When we got to our tables, we had to remain standing in silence with our hands holding the back of our chairs at two thumb lengths apart before being invited to take our seats. Work also was done in silence apart from when we had permission to ask questions. Surprisingly, Mr P was very patient with those who did not understand the work; what sky-rocketed his ire was dishonourable conduct. On one occasion, he caught me copying another pupil’s answers in a Maths test. Furiously crimson, he pronounced my demotion (it was briefly temporary I am pleased to say) from my monitor’s post. Sometimes, his clemency blindsided us. When he discovered, I know not how, our sobriquet for him, which was the Ol’ Codger, he laughed with delight. And I nearly sobbed with relief. Never once did I witness Mr P resort to corporal punishment. His chainsaw voice and Gorgonish gaze was sufficient to quench our delinquency. Pinching, slapping and throwing board rubbers were the methods of those less in command of themselves and others.

We pupils knew that Mr P had been a soldier in World War Two. He wore his uniform to school on the Friday that fell closest to Remembrance Sunday. I have since identified that his epaulettes were graced with the insignia of Lieutenant Colonel, a rank he reached sometime after the War. He was one of the generations of retired military men enticed into teaching by the Government that saw in them a capacity for imparting discipline to the young. Recruiting such men meant a teaching profession that taught things confidently and rigorously rather than seeing itself as Rousseau-like ‘facilitators’ of learning, cringing before their pupils’ supposedly innate knowledge. Such a profession would never have been cowed by the tedious Gradgrinds of Ofsted, overawed by the obscenely salaried CEOs of multi-academy trusts, or cajoled into conniving with louche pressure groups to cause pre-pubescent pupils to question their gender without their parents’ knowledge. Crouching in the jungle’s darkness to avoid machine gunfire tends to do a remarkably good job at helping people see reality for what it is.

I close with what I do not think is bromidic or sentimental. It is true, as the Kohima epitaph declares, that we who have never known directly a major war owe our freedoms to a generation of people who responded to the call for democracy’s defence against Nazism’s vicious vileness. As the Enlightenment philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797) observed, we are part of an eternal society in which the living rest on the achievements of the dead and who themselves, when they have passed, will be the foundation on which future generations rest. The generation gap and its concretion into a hermetic ‘yoof culture’ is poison to civilisation. This time of remembrance of debts owed to the dead is a propitious moment to ask what our legacy will be to future generations when we have gone the way of all grass. Will we let it be postmodern prattle about truth and morality being relative, and the self-lacerating idiocy of thinking the West and its history are uniquely evil? Or will it be one where people are free to speak their opinions and where objective truth, universal moral intuitions and simple patriotism are honoured. That is what Mr P’s generation knew and defended, and which motivated their fight: thus, because they were right, it is not ours to cancel for any reason or anyone, but to pass on like a blood-spattered sceptre to younger hands.

Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).

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