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| Normandy Commemoration Ceremony June 4, 2001 |
June 04, 2001 |
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Remarks of Congresswoman Heather Wilson
Normandy Commemoration Ceremony
June 4, 2001
On December 7, 1941 the attack on Pearl Harbor awakened a sleeping giant, and America went to war. Millions of young Americans left their farms and their peaceful lives to enlist.
It took over two years to assemble the armada that would begin the battle to reclaim the continent of Europe from four long years of darkness. Free nations were enslaved. Jews were dying in the camps. Millions prayed for liberation.
At dawn on June 6, 1944 the liberation of a continent began on a forty-mile stretch of beach in Normandy. The British and Canadians would land on the eastern beaches – Sword, Juno and Gold. The Americans would land at Utah and Omaha.
In the middle was Point du Hoc where the Rangers would scale the cliffs and capture the German gun emplacements that looked down on the beaches below.
The navy and the air corps bombarded the coast and the 82nd and 101st airborne divisions parachuted in with heavy casualties and much confusion to secure the roads and key towns behind the beaches.
At Utah beach Brigadier General Teddy Roosevelt led the first wave to land. Luck and the tides took them 2000 meters south of their intended landing zone, so they improvised and secured the beach and started to move inland. The son of a President, he earned the Medal of Honor by noontime and would die in France in less than two months.
But the heaviest resistance was at Omaha.
Most of the men who landed there at dawn had never been in combat before. They weren’t there for treasure or for land. They weren’t there to prove they were a superior race. They were liberators, not conquerors. Men who knew that freedom was worth fighting for – even if it is not your own.
2,500 men would never make it beyond the beach at Omaha. By mid-morning, General Omar Bradley, sensing disaster, was considering braking off the assault. That would mean Utah beach would be separated from the Canadians and British, and the whole landing might fail. But then, before he made a fateful decision to withdraw, things began to turn.
For all the planning and rehearsal, the battle for Normandy was a soldiers battle. Citizen soldiers, regardless of rank, improvising, gaining a toehold to liberate a continent.
The filmmaker Steven Spielberg sent the first cut of his film Saving Private Ryan to New Orleans where the great historian of D-Day Stephen Ambrose saw it in private. When the film ended, they handed him a cell phone and Spielberg asked him what he thought of the film.
Ambrose told him it was a truthful film, a good film. There’s only one problem: Tom Hanks is too old. At first we laugh. But these were boys -- eighteen, nineteen, twenty year old boys -- full of life and dreams and impossible courage.
Fifty-seven summers have passed since the men in front of you were the boys who helped to liberate a continent and then came home to build an American century.
You represent the best of who we are as Americans: a selfless, freedom-loving, faithful, courageous people.
You’ve lived good lives. Thank you for your service and for your sacrifice. |
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