Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

The people called “leaders of the free world” and some 4,500 of their citizens gathered on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, on June 6 to mark the 80^th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. D-Day is often considered the beginning of the end of World War II.

The annual rites of memories, mourning, and hope had a special poignancy this year. It was clear this would be the last time many of the few hundred remaining D-Day veterans would visit their place of nightmares, where they scrambled to establish a beachhead to bring the battle home to Hitler.

After all, the 156,000 Allied soldiers, including some 70,000 Americans, who tried to come ashore on the first D-Day were mostly teenagers and young adults. Some 4,500 of them, including 2,500 Americans, were killed that first day.

Those who have survived since the landings and almost another year of combat are now in their late 90s or early 100s. An estimated 150 or so American vets attended the D-Day ceremonies.

D-Day observances in France also had some poignancy. Perhaps for the first time, the events recognized the almost 18,000 French civilians—men, women, and children—killed in U.S. or British bombing raids before or soon after D-Day.

French President Emmanuel Macron broached that subject, which has rarely been acknowledged in France, in a June 5 speech. The international news agency Reuters reported,

“Eighty years later, the Nation must recognize with clarity and strength the civilian victims of Allied bombings, in Normandy, and elsewhere on our soil. We must bring this memory into full light,” Macron said in Saint-Lo, a city largely destroyed by Allied bombings.

“Without concealing anything, but without confusing anything. Because the inhabitants of Saint-Lo never mixed hatred or resentment with their sorrow,” he said.

Those civilian deaths

Ed Vulliamy and Pascal Vannier discussed the Allied bombing and civilian deaths in far more detail— 5,500 words of detail—in the June 20 issue of The New York Review of Books.

Their article, “D-Day’s Forgotten Victims Speak Out,” discusses several books that cover civilian deaths in wartime, some with a focus on France under bombardment by British and U.S. planes.

Two themes of the article are (1) how apparently much of the bombing was unnecessary and served no military purpose and (2) how the bombing has provoked little or no complaint or grievances against France’s wartime and contemporary allies.

For some insight, I turned to a former student from France, whom I met at the University of North Dakota 50 years ago. Fabrice Moussus is now a friend and occasional presence in my Bleeding Heartland posts, including a review of his memoir, Grab the Moment.

Now retired, Fabrice covered wars, terrorism, and hatred in the Middle East and elsewhere as the video person ABC News relied upon when Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, or Barbara Walters went overseas, usually to cover horrors.

Some of his thoughts:

This aspect of D-Day and the people who were killed by allied bombings is almost never mentioned. Today we would refer to that as ‘co-lateral damage’… Even before WWII, the feelings of the people living in Normandy always showed sympathy for the British going back to William the Conqueror. [1028-1087]. 

I have never heard or read much about French criticism of the American bombings. I don’t think there was any conscious decision to cover it up either. It’s just that the feeling of being liberated by the allies, mostly Americans, was overwhelming…

When you visit Normandy, the pro-American feelings run high, more than anywhere else in France. Cities like Caen and Le Havre were almost totally destroyed and replaced with ugly 1950s concrete architecture but people do not complain.

Many people will attend the commemorations because they feel that this is the last one where veterans will still be present.

On D-Day, Fabrice pointed out, Allied forces consisted primarily of American, British, and Canadian troops but also included Australian, Belgian, Czech, Dutch, French, Greek, New Zealand, Norwegian, Rhodesian and Polish naval, air, or ground support.

Here are some of my thoughts about coming to grips with the bombings, about which I knew little before reading the New York Review of Books coverage:

• The Americans that most French people encountered in WW II were not bomber pilots in the air but GI’s on the ground—like “Willie and Joe,” the cartoon characters of Bill Mauldin in the military magazine Stars and Stripes. These liberators were welcomed and loved. Liberation held sway over bombardment.

• Silence about suffering may be a first resort. Children of those who served in combat frequently mention how quiet dad was about that. Likewise, children of those 112,000 Japanese Americans herded into incarceration camps in World War II often have been in their mid-50s or older before mom or dad talked about their shameless and unwarranted loss of liberty.

• Don’t get caught up in a numbers game. Yes, the number of French people killed by our WW II bombs is less than half the number of women, children and men killed in the Gaza strip, by some of our bombs supplied to the Israel Defense Forces. And more than 400,000 German civilians were ushered to death under allied bombing by the Third Reich.

In pitiless, mordant language the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin proclaimed, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” A Socratic website suggests, “This quote encapsulates the insidious nature of human psychology, shedding light on our tendency to detach ourselves emotionally from large-scale tragedies.”

• All of us, in a way, are survivors of warfare. For some 5,000 years of so-called civilization, survivors have not paid the debts owed to those who fought for freedom on countless D-Days.

We even have a candidate for president who mocked a naval officer for being a prisoner of war and called some of the American casualties of war “losers” or “suckers.”

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Top photo was published on President Joe Biden’s official Facebook page on June 6.