Phyllis Chesler Interviews Carol Gould

carol gould

Join our email list for updates.

subscribe
unsubscribe


.

 

We hope that you'll feel our website is worthy enough to contribute a few pounds to the bandwidth bills.



 

 

D-Day 70th -- Lest we Forget
Last uploaded : Monday 2nd Jun 2014 at 01:04
Contributed by : Carol Gould

 

D-Day, June 6th 1944, which we commemorate every year, celebrates the ‘beginning of the end,’ in Churchill’s words, of the tyranny of fascism and Naziism in World War II. Sadly, in 2014 we are compelled to reflect upon the hideous issues that continue to crop up across the globe. Syria is a massive ruin after three years of civil war. Since the Second World War country after country and region after region has found itself engulfed in internecine conflict or war. As this goes to press Boko Haram, an Islamic extremist sect, is wreaking death and destruction in Nigeria.

I made a pilgrimage to Omaha Beach in 2004 and plan to commemorate the 70th anniversary of D-Day in 2014. Interestingly on a trip to Portsmouth to the D-Day Museum in 2013 the young English cab driver did not know it was 69 years on and that the invasion of Normandy, the largest armada in 835 years, had unfolded in 1944. Hopefully it will be taught in schools for many years to come and that its significance to free nations will never be forgotten.

On my pilgrimage to Portsmouth I met the dwindling contingent of British D-Day veterans who meet each year on June 6th to remember the thousands of their fallen comrades-in-arms.

What is less well-known is that the weeks after D-Day saw staggering carnage in Nazi-occupied France and that the days after June 6th, 1944 were as important in world history as the events of 1066. Indeed, the Overlord Embroidery, which adorns the walls of the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth, is modelled after the Bayeaux Tapestry and represents the free world’s salvation in the face of the horrors of a Hitlerian empire. The Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 was the largest deployment of an expeditionary force in human history and meant the future of mankind was in the balance. Dwight Eisenhower had a chilling speech in his pocket prepared for the eventuality of defeat.

Had he and Bernard Montgomery failed we would not be fretting over the future life of Strictly Come Dancing or spending endless television and radio hours discussing who will succeed David Moyes at Manchester United. We would not be lionising celebrity chefs or waiting anxiously for news of the Beckhams’ latest house move. Had the men of Normandy 1944 failed we could have been plunged into a Thousand Year Reich. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin did not allow this to happen. In recent years friends raging at me at dinner parties have roundly condemned FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt for being ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘card carrying Communists’ but I will never shrink from defending them as guardians of freedom in the darkest age modern man has ever known.

On June 6th 2009 on one of my annual pilgrimages to Portsmouth, a city from which thousands of Americans departed for their ultimate sacrifice, I met a British D Day veteran who was still furious with the United States even after sixty-five years. He made sure, having detected my American accent, to fulminate about Roosevelt not entering the war early enough and imposing a huge debt upon Britain that it only finished repaying in 2008.

What I found interesting was his observation that America wasted no time in going to war in Afghanistan but that in 1940 it left Britain to stand up to Hitler alone for two terrible years. He was not willing to talk about this to my video camera, but said he needed to get off his chest sixty-five years of rage. He was not moved by the fact that over 9,000 young Americans lie under crosses and stars at Omaha Beach. Reasoning with him that the United States invaded Afghanistan because it had been attacked on September 11th, 2001 made no difference. He was determined to paint America as almost criminally negligent in its refusal to come to Britain’s aid as soon as war was declared in 1939.

This is an accusation I have heard for the thirty-eight years in which I have lived in Britain. Watching the film ‘The Gathering Storm,’ one is acutely aware of the total lack of preparedness in Britain and Europe in the Wilderness Years as Hitler marched across the Continent and the Channel Islands. (When I was researching my book, “Spitfire Girls,” I discovered that Germany was training future Luftwaffe aces at flying clubs for many years before the outbreak of World War II because the Treaty of Versailles had forbidden German militarisation. ) The only individuals other than Winston Churchill who had a clear understanding of the Hell the Fuehrer was about to perpetrate on humanity were the Jehovah‘s Witnesses. No-one listened. The Witnesses were amongst the first to be sent to concentration camps wearing the purple triangle.

I always attend the annual service held in Portsmouth Cathedral to commemorate the anniversary of D-Day. On one of these occasions the Chaplain of the British Army gave the address and recounted a trip he had taken with his young children to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He said he had in recent years been asked if the huge loss of life on D-Day had made sense. He said the unspeakable atrocities in the camp, in which Jehovah’s Witnesses and political dissidents had been incarcerated alongside Jews, would have become our daily life had the Allies not triumphed on D-Day and in the subsequent battles.

Another veteran was moved to tears as I tried to film him telling his story. He began to sob talking about the death of his Commanding Officer and I ended up gripping his hand with one of mine whilst holding my video camera with the other. All of the octogenarian veterans I met live the Normandy Invasion as if it were yesterday. Their grief is real and searing.

The grim tally of deaths was staggering: 435,000 killed, wounded or missing in action on both sides in just the Battle of Normandy alone. As we sit and chatter about ’Britain’s Got Talent’ the carnage of 1944 seems so far away.

But as I walked around Portsmouth I could sense the presence of the tens of thousands of young men who never came back to this coastal city. An RAF fly-past had dropped one million poppies and they kept appearing for days -- on the windowsill of my guest house, on the beach, on the ledge of the ATM machine, on the tracks of Southsea railway station… simply everywhere. As I watched them blow in the wind I realised each one represented a dead serviceman or woman. I bent down to pick one up but it seemed to get its own life and pull away from me. I then tried another but it pulled away: as if to say, ‘I don’t want to be separated from my buddy.’ In 2004 I went to Omaha Beach and looked out at those seemingly endless fields of crosses. Somehow these poppies were even more poignant.

The ghosts of those brave and painfully young men of June hover over Britain, Europe and the free world as we go about our easy lives. In the wake of the raging conflicts in Ukraine , the Middle East and Africa we are reminded that extremism is still in our midst and that tyranny can come to our shores. May we never forget the sacrifice of the men of D-Day and the Battle of Normandy. May we always be proud of the dynamic and free society in which we live and be ready to defend it.

*************************************************

Carol Gould is the London-based, Philadelphia-born author of Don’t Tread on Me: Anti-Americanism Abroad, Spitfire Girls, and A Room at Camp Pickett, a play about her mother’s experiences as a WAC in World War II; she has completed films about black GIs and GI babies. Carol has been a panellist on BBC's Any Questions? hosted by Jonathan Dimbleby, and on Sky News, Press TV, the BBC World Service and on the award-winning Victoria Derbyshire Show on BBC Five Live.

Read more Editorials    go >>

 

 


KD Web - Web Design
© Jewish Comment .com

All Rights reserved.
No copying of any text or images allowed in any form digitally or otherwise,
without the prior written consent of the copyright holders.