Honoring American Greatness

“Make America Great Again,” the dominant slogan in the recent presidential campaign, doesn’t deal with what makes America great in the first place.

My wife and I just returned from a trip on which we could viscerally feel what makes our nation great. We visited a 172.5-acre field in Coleville-du-Mer, France, with rows of white marble Latin crosses or Stars of David stretching across a breathtaking landscape.

photo by Diane Picchiottino

The graves mark the U.S. military cemetery on bluffs overlooking Omaha Beach, the site of the deadliest battle on D-Day, the audacious American attack that freed Europe from the grip of a madman. They also memorialize the values of sacrifice and courage that led Americans from all walks of life to set aside complacency, take up arms, and do the right thing.

The spirits and souls of 9,388 men and women who rest eternally on French soil define the true measure of American greatness, which goes far beyond some political slogan. The graves honor those who died in a war to help others. The cemetery also contains the names of an additional 1,557 servicemen declared missing in action during World War Two. They may be gone, but the valor they displayed on June 6, 1944, continues to soar silently over the field of white makers as gracefully as the flight of an eagle.    

They were mailmen, salesmen, teachers, students, women, men -- many of them young – who, sometimes reluctantly, became U.S. soldiers and spilled their blood on soil that was not American. They went to war to stop a tyrant who had stormed borders and seized land that rightfully belonged to others. The conflict that cost them their lives didn’t start as an American war, but it ended as one, and America won it. The nation led a strike that freed Europe from a nightmare. The values of duty and honor that imbue the codes of the American military as much as a rifle are what made America great.

Standing on the cliffs overlooking Omaha Beach or gazing at the sea beneath the steep cliffs of Point du Hoc, it’s hard to fathom how Dwight D. Eisenhower, the American five-star general and later U.S. president, could have orchestrated such a daring attack.

He commanded a force that eventually totaled some one million troops from thirty-nine Allied divisions and thousands of tanks, ships, trucks, jeeps, and airplanes that dropped 10,395 tons of bombs to overcome a brutal German military machine. That is greatness.

How he could have coordinated such a sweeping invasion is a feat overwhelmed only by the mystical feeling that occurs when the field of white markers slips into view. The attack known as D-Day triggered a larger bloody assault called Operation Overlord that liberated a battered, starved, tortured people. The march to victory exposed piles of emaciated bodies, a grim legacy of Adolph Hitler’s murder of six million European Jews.

Although the crosses and markers honor fallen soldiers, they also memorialize a different America, a nation able to put aside its differences to rally around a common cause and smite an evil foe. A peacetime draft signed into law four years before D-Day guaranteed that the war would touch the lives of many Americans as a nation in need conscripted children and spouses from all levels of society into the war effort. 

Some sixteen million Americans served in the military as the war raged in Europe and Asia, including about 11.5 million draftees, or sixty-one percent of the nation’s armed forces. Just over twelve percent of the population filled the military ranks, although by 1950 one in three U.S. men over the age of eighteen were veterans. Soldiers buried in Normandy came from families powerful and poor alike.

The body of Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., son of President Theodore Roosevelt, rests beneath one of the white crosses, as does his younger brother Quentin, President Teddy Roosevelt’s youngest son killed in World War One. His body was reinterred to Normandy so he could rest eternally beside his brother.

A white cross also marks the grave of Private Roy Talheim, a sixteen-year-old semi-skilled painter from Hagerstown, Maryland, who lied about his age to join the 101st Airborne Division. Talheim parachuted into Normandy as part of the D-Day invasion and was killed by a German artillery attack a few days later. He died at age seventeen, making him the youngest soldier buried at the Normandy cemetery. Although males populate most of the graves, four women who served their country also rest beneath the white markers.

The world today is a far different place than the one that sent more than 400,000 Americans to graves in Normandy and at other sites around the world. America now relies upon a sliver of its people to fight our wars. Less than one percent of the American population serves in the military; about six percent are veterans. Faced with the unpopularity of the draft during the Vietnam War, President Richard Nixon ended the conscription in 1973, giving the nation its current all-volunteer military.

Surely, no one wants to return to the world that gave us the meticulously measured rows of white crosses in Normandy. Some disturbing parallels exist in contemporary times, though. The world has another despot in Russia, Vladimir Putin, who has seized land that doesn’t belong to him. Ukraine may be only the tip of his spear. Strip away the noise and bluster that pollutes the American political scene, and you have another failed World War Two policy, that of appeasement, a strategy that shows how treachery respects no borders or limits.

Yesteryear’s wartime leaders created a North American Treaty Organization alliance that has largely kept the peace in Europe for about eight decades, but that, too, is under threat, both in America and in the populist political machinations roiling Europe.

Our best hope is that the angel of our better selves that floats over the hallowed ground of Coleville-du-Mer will honor the sacrifice symbolized by the white crosses of Normandy. “Time,” said General John J. Pershing, “does not dim the glory of their deeds.”

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Substack, Five W’s + H here.