Each of the decennial anniversaries of D-Day since the 40th in 1984 has brought the American president and his French counterpart to Normandy. The 65th anniversary in 2009 did likewise. It is safe to say, however, that none of these occasions has surpassed President Ronald Reagan’s visit. For one thing, 1984 was an election year, and the details of timing and backdrop for the president’s first major address on June 6 at Pointe du Hoc in front of scores of U.S. Ranger veterans who had seized that spot on the “Day of Days” 40 years earlier were carefully orchestrated to embellish his reelection bid. The profound emotional impact of the speech in front of the “boys of Pointe du Hoc” and the one later in the afternoon at the American cemetery has reverberated through all the years thereafter.
One scholar has observed that Reagan’s day in Normandy “played a seminal role in launching the great reappreciation of World War II veterans that swept America in the 1980s and continues today largely unabated.” When the president’s voice cracked during the reference in his speech at the cemetery to Lisa Zanatta Henn, the daughter of a deceased D-Day veteran, who was attending to honor her father and put flowers on his grave, millions got to see the power of these memorials to stir the deepest and most genuine senses of pride, gratitude, and sorrow. Reagan’s death at 93 years of age and one day shy of the 60th anniversary of D-Day in 2004 somehow seemed profoundly fitting.
The subsequent release of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” in 1998 added significantly to the intensifying degree of remembrance focused upon the World War II generation. Two scenes filmed by a grave in the American cemetery above Omaha Beach and positioned at the beginning and the end of this powerful movie were the only ones done on location in Normandy. Spielberg shot them during a single day with the special permission of the American Battle Monuments Commission’s Paris office.
Throughout the spate of interviews he gave on the occasion of the film’s release, the celebrated director made no effort to hide the emotional effect the cemetery had on him. The first time he saw it, Spielberg said, he was “overwhelmed” and immediately resolved that “we must preserve for our children the memory of the veterans.” Tom Hanks, who starred in the film, repeatedly echoed these sentiments. Upon his initial visit to the cemetery, Hanks had been “very moved by the crosses.” As the filming concluded, the actor’s thoughts had turned to “the men who lay beneath the crosses.” The strongly positive reception of the film, capped by the presentation of the American Legion’s “Spirit of Normandy” award to Spielberg in September 1998, sealed the lasting effect it would leave on public sentiments. Superintendent Phil Rivers reported at the end of that same month, for example, that visitors to the American cemetery had increased by one-third over September 1997. The graves of the Niland brothers, after whom the story in Spielberg’s movie is loosely based, continue to attract large numbers of visitors within the cemetery.
These increased numbers played an important part in creating the opportunity for the commission to embark upon its newly found emphasis on “interpretation.” Early in the new century, Reps. John Murtha and David Obey visited the burial grounds above Omaha Beach and were singularly unimpressed by the smallness of the existing visitor center and by the fact that there was little at the site to inform tourists of the history of the cemetery, the men buried there, or the fighting that cost them their lives. Thanks to the work of these two men, Congress eventually committed $30 million to this project. On Aug. 28, 2004, ground was broken for the “Normandy American Visitor and Interpretive Center,” a 30,000-square-foot structure nestled in the brush atop the bluffs at the eastern edge of the cemetery grounds, between the graves area and a monument to the U.S. 1st Division.
This emphasis on interpretation is not an entirely new one; Gen. John J. Pershing, the American Battle Monuments Commission’s first chairman, insisted on the inclusion of maps and historical inscriptions at the original sites to ensure that for visitors, at least, “time will not dim the glory of their deeds.” But the scope of the commission’s current effort exceeds anything possible during Pershing’s time. Further, its emphasis on giving fuller, more personalized identities to the soldiers buried in the cemeteries is a means of giving voices to the dead in a manner capable of inspiring the living. This is especially important at a time when the World War I veterans are all gone, and the World War II generation is itself passing into immortality.
Nicolaus Mills has observed that the building of the national World War II memorial was an exercise in “constructing more than the eye can see.” The parts of the monument that the eye could see, in other words, were meant somehow to lead people to the values that constituted America’s “civil religion” and transcended the limits of physical sight. The same holds true of the Visitor Center in Normandy. It’s a reminder that, as a wise man once put it, the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
The above is an adapted excerpt from War and Remembrance: The Story of the American Battle Monuments Commission. The author, Thomas H. Conner, is the William P. Harris Chair in Military History at Hillsdale College.
