Laetitia Vancon/The New York Times
The American Cemetery in Normandy holds 9,388 graves.
Most of them young soldiers who died 80 years ago...
...during the Allied invasion on the shores of France.
Fewer and fewer of those who survived are still alive.
Today their sacrifices loom over a newly precarious time.
D-Day at 80
Veterans of the pivotal battle of World War II are disappearing. Europe, facing new conflict, recalls what their comrades died for.
Roger Cohen reported from Normandy, and Laetitia Vancon from Normandy and the United States.
They were ordinary. The young men from afar who clambered ashore on June 6, 1944, into a hail of Nazi gunfire from the Normandy bluffs did not think of themselves as heroes.
No, said Gen. Darryl A. Williams, the commanding general of United States Army Europe and Africa, the Allied soldiers “in this great battle were ordinary,” youths who “rose to this challenge with courage and a tremendous will to win, for freedom.”
In front of the general, during a ceremony this week at Deauville on the Normandy coast, were 48 American survivors of that day, the youngest of them 98, most of them 100 years old or more. The veterans sat in wheelchairs. They saluted, briskly enough. Eight decades have gone by, many of them passed in silence because memories of the war were too terrible to relate.
When the 90th anniversary of D-Day comes around in 2034, there may be no more vets. Living memory of the beaches of their sacrifice will be no more.
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