D-Day veterans would hang their heads in shame at the new world of Trump and Musk
As the few remaining elderly D-Day veterans gathered on the beaches of Normandy this morning to commemorate their friends who never came home, it was salutary to realise that these handful of heroes are the last surviving witnesses to a day that literally saved the free world. Today we commemorate this historic event with bunting and brass bands, but the reality of being there was something else entirely.
After months of planning the largest-ever armada of ships, troops, planes and military vehicles spilled onto Normandy beaches in a determined hope to push back the Nazi terror that had been gathering just a handful of miles from British shores. As the first landing craft dropped their doors and allied soldiers hit the water, more than 90% of them never made it to the beach. It is estimated that more than 4,400 allied troops lost their lives on that day and – in the ensuing battle of Normandy – more than 73,000 were killed, with 153,000 wounded. For the record, we don’t know exactly how many Germans were killed, but it’s thought to have been up to 9,000, along with more than 20,000 French civilians.
Today, the Rev Simon d’Albertanson, a Royal Navy chaplain and the chaplain for the Spirit of Normandy Trust whose grandfather fought in the Second World War, led a memorial service at the British Normandy Memorial in Ver-sur-Mer, Describing D-Day as a “seminal moment in history”, Mr d’Albertanson said: “We forget it at our peril. There’s a legacy that builds from the different conflicts, and we live in very troubled times right now, and we need men and women who are fighting for peace.
“As a Christian, one of the lines in the Bible is ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ … we’re called to make peace and sometimes that means we have to bring violence, but that’s the last resort … we want to be peacemakers.”
One veteran in attendance, Ken Hay MBE, 99, was just 18 when he landed at Courseulles-sur-Mer on D-Day +5. He laid a wreath at the memorial service in Ver-sur-Mer alongside other veterans. Speaking to LBC News afterwards Mr Hay said: “Even though the 80th anniversary has passed, we veterans still feel it is our duty to come back here and remember all our friends who never came home … we get applauded, even though they are the ones who gave it all.
“Sharing my stories with children in the UK and France is something I am very passionate about. We are the age of their great-grandparents – we experienced it, understand it and know that it should never happen again.”
Sadly, all those who attended today’s ceremonies will have looked back and thought about the enormous debt we all owe to those who put their own lives and priorities aside to rid the world of Nazi tranny and help restore peace to western Europe.
“As we reset the nation’s contract with our armed forces, we will continue to remember all those who served to defend our values,” said Defence Secretary John Healey as he laid his wreath at Ver-sur-Mer. Resetting the nation’s contract with our armed forces is certainly one way to describe the seismic shift in defence policy that has suddenly become necessary due to the global events of the past few weeks. The persistent erosion of our defence capabilities over recent decades was the result of a number of converging threads of political change – the successes of anti-militarist and pacifist campaigns across the 1970s and 80s did much to turn the public away from the endorsement of militarism; this led to a growing confidence that the threat of nuclear annihilation was receding; also, the spreading influence of free market capitalism led many to believe that offensive players could be bought off with western materialism; and last but not least failures by successive governments to manage the economy led defence spending to become a ‘soft target’ for cuts and rationalisations.
The result is that just three decades after the abyss of the Bay of Pigs, and the end of the Cold War, we are once again confronting a disintegrating and increasingly violent world with shifts in global power would have been inconceivable a few decades ago. What makes the present situation even more alarming is that Great Britain is continuing to storm around the world like it was the week after D-Day, when all we have to negotiate with is a military option that everyone knows has been decimated and now lies in tatters.
Just how bad the situation has become was revealed just last month by BBC Defence Correspondent Jonathan Beale, who had been speaking to crew members from the nuclear submarine HMS Vanguard, one of Britain’s top drawer defence tools. The men had just returned to Faslane in western Scotland after a whopping 204 days underwater. Normally three months is a maximum for nuclear sub crews, but staff shortages, maintenance delays and other logistical problems are forcing crews to spend dangerously long shifts at sea. Such is the seriousness of the problem that the starving crew of Vanguard were forced to rummage in cupboards for food and had to make bread out of custard powder, as they’d run out of flower. And remember, these are the guys who, when all else fails, are charged with launching missiles of unimaginable mass destruction.
Further down the UK military store cupboard, anyone who lives on Merseyside will be able to tell you that the great Cammell Laird shipyard in Tranmere has long been host to a sorry trail of newly commissioned Navy warships that have scuttled back up the Mersey for complex and long-term repairs after failing miserably in even the most temperate of sea conditions. One of the most familiar sites to shoppers staring across from Liverpool’s Albert Dock was HMS Dauntless, a £1bn state-of-the-art warship whose much-praised propulsion system failed after just weeks in the Gulf. It took more than 800 days to get the ship back into service, after which it was discovered that other ships critical to our defence had the exact same fault. More than £160m was spent at Cammell Laird rectifying the faults – great news for local employment but a huge setback to our claims of being a world-ranking military power.
For many, especially more senior citizens who fought their ideological way through the heady anti-nuclear days of the 1970s and 80s, this may seem of little significant, but in thr blinking of an eye it has suddenly become a critically important issue, as the world has begun to enter a phase in its development (if that is the right ways of describing it) in which most of the rules of both peace and warfare have been all but shredded. In Gaza, for instance, we’re witnessing an unprecedented obliteration of human life that has long passed the moniker of a genocide; in Russia Putin seems to be losing little sleep over approaching the horrific landmark of having wasted the lives of more than one million young Russian men in his obsessive pursuit of Ukrainian territory, and closer to home no-one seems entirely certain whether or not the world is stumbling onto World War Three, or has already embarked on such insanity.
As if this isn’t worrying enough, we seem to have handed control of the world to a collection of characters whom – if they had behaved as are a few decades ago – would have been ridiculed as affected and eccentric. This morning’s news tells it all – overnight President Putin has started to exact ruthless and bloody revenge on Ukraine, with deadly missiles raining down on olyn, Lviv, Ternopil, Kyiv, Sumy, Poltava, Khmelnytskyi, Cherkasy, and Chernihiv regions. In Gaza, Israel has carried out brutally targeted air strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs last night – on the eve of Eid Al Adha, one of the most important celebrations in Islam. These stories have been reported, but the death and mayhem has been pushed aside whilst two of the world’s most powerful and influential men whack handbags on social media with tirades that would frankly mortify a fourteen-year-old.
The rift between Donald Trump and Elon Musk undoubtedly makes for good gossip, but this is one dreadful consequence of the new media age in which we live. No longer is it of very much interest to the general public – or indeed probably to some politicians – what concreate and meaningful actions we might need to take to solve the most troubling and frustrating concerns of the day. What matters in this mad, new age is the narrative, and even worse, the soundbite. In truth we may have entered a dark, Orwellian age when unreality and intentional ignorance is the weapon with which people are beginning to govern, whilst dictators and despots are allowed to go their merry way wreaking havoc and destruction upon the innocent.
This may seem unreasonable and fatalistic, but unless we start to recognise that this is what is really happening in the world right now, we find ourselves very uncapable of providing the critical spiritual and moral counter-narratives that will be needed desperately in the times ahead.
Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and public theologian