D.J. Tice: In spite of an awful war, they ‘had a good feeling about this country’

Opinion editor’s note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

Like many veterans of World War II, my father spoke only rarely of his 303 days in combat zones between June 1944 and April 1945. When pestered by his kids for war stories he often fell back on two lingering images.

“The surf was pink,” Dad would say of Omaha Beach, the bloodiest killing field of D-Day. There, 80 years ago this week, on a narrow, fortified strip of sand in northwest France, the 29-year-old from Arkansas went ashore with the Second Infantry Division on the morning after the initial assault.

My father also would remember how, throughout weeks and months that followed, he would watch waves of American and British bombers pass overhead, flying eastward to rain devastation on German troops and cities.

“And before the last of them had passed,” he’d always add, with a curious tone of something like pity in his voice, “the first ones already would be coming back.”

Even as a credulous pre-teen, not yet inclined to automatically question my father’s version of reality, I found those stories slightly hard to believe. But decades later, in Steven Spielberg’s shattering homage to the generation that fought and won the months-long Battle of Normandy — the movie itself a quarter-century old now — I encountered corroboration of what Dad couldn’t forget.

Spielberg had pestered surviving veterans of history’s largest amphibious invasion for details to give “Saving Private Ryan” its wounding authenticity. And at the end of his unflinching dramatization of the assault on Omaha Beach he let his camera linger on a decidedly rosy surf washing over the corpses of fallen GIs.

Dad wasn’t the only one who remembered.

One of the ways in which America is unusual is that it is a great nation whose origins are reasonably modern and well-documented. Whether one argues that the country’s essential character made landfall with the Pilgrims or with the first slave ships, America’s original sins and inborn virtues are discoverable, not shrouded in ancient mists like the emergence of China, say, or India, even Britain or France.

In our day it seems ever harder to doubt that, whatever its starting point, American civilization has passed its peak. Not in every way, of course, but in ways that count deeply — in heart, in spirit and in daring, in the felt sense of what Franklin Roosevelt called his nation’s “rendezvous with destiny.”

Perhaps today’s toxically estranged tribes could shake the societal self-loathing and self-pity that seem to be the main sentiments they share if they would look back and ponder just when America came nearest to fulfilling its best ideals. Or at least when it most believed in that possibility.

Some years ago I recorded an oral history interview with my mother focused on “the special feeling” she recalled during the war years. I asked how much people worried about losing the war.

“You never worried about losing the war,” she snapped. “You worried about losing a lot of men. But we weren’t going to lose the war. Everybody was so committed.”

They were harder times, but happier times. “In spite of how bad it all was,” Mom said, “you really had a good feeling about this country.”

Today, a much richer, more tolerant, more just and less threatened society can’t seem even to imagine such an uncomplicated sense of common purpose.

I’d suggest that the invasion of Normandy eight decades ago this summer, by Americans from Arkansas and California and Minnesota and New Jersey and everywhere else, to liberate somebody else’s faraway country from hateful tyranny, came pretty close to what Winston Churchill might have called America’s “finest hour.”

Almost 20 years ago, my elder brother and I traveled to France to follow Dad’s wartime path across western Europe. The iconic American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, above Omaha Beach, where 9,386 GIs rest, is a place of power every American should see. One inscribed quotation has specially stayed with me, from Gen. Mark Clark:

“... We fought for a cause, not a conquest … . All we asked was enough soil in which to bury our gallant dead.”

Yes. But of course Americans of the past often fought for conquest as well, at the expense of American Indians, Mexicans, Spanish, Filipinos and more.

The only real trouble with the American left’s enthusiasm for a “critical” approach to history, fully confronting America’s injustices and cruelties, is that it obscures the reality that much of the history of every culture, nation and religion is dominated by injustice and cruelty, at least from the standpoint of the groups they conquered and displaced.

Such sorrowful chapters are the regrettably un-exceptional parts of American history. They surely should be examined, but not so tirelessly that all focus is lost on the arguably more interesting, and surely more inspiring, episodes when America did better.

Still, to give unromanticized history its due, even the crusade against Nazi Germany raised hard-to-answer moral questions. War is like that. Dad’s mixed feelings about those bombers were justified.

In his monumental “Modern Times,” the great conservative English historian Paul Johnson painfully detailed the Anglo-American “terror-bombing” campaign against Germany and Japan.

“[A] primary objective” of all the air strikes on cities “was the destruction of the morale of … civilians,” Johnson wrote. A “Jupiter Complex” seduced many — a “notion of the Allies as righteous gods, raining retributive thunderbolts on their wicked enemies.”

The “greatest moral disaster” of the European air war, the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden, Germany, “was carried out in two waves,” Johnson wrote, “… in accordance with Bomber Command’s tactic of the ‘double blow,’ the second falling when relief forces had concentrated on the city. Over 650,000 incendiaries were dropped, the firestorm engulfing eight square miles … and killing 135,000 men, women and children … . The funeral pyres were still flaming a fortnight after the raid.”

No doubt many Germans of that Nazi generation got what they deserved. But maybe that didn’t fully apply to all the thousands of children burned alive that night in their Mardi Gras costumes.

In short, when it faced a war it was not prepared to lose, America gave little quarter to anyone. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s order of the day on D-Day declared that “We will accept nothing less than full victory!” — hardly a call for restraint, even if it wasn’t as blunt as Churchill’s vow to Congress that the allies’ enemies would be taught “a lesson which they and the world will never forget.”

Yet today America, with serene moral certitude, pressures Israel to forgo full victory over enemies sworn to destroy it.

Maybe, after all, we need more, not fewer, tough-minded history lessons.

G.K. Chesterton called America “a nation with the soul of a church,” being “the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed,” not a common ancestry. America’s faith that liberty and equality, rightly understood, can and must co-exist is a secular one. But like other “churches,” the country is prone to schism and strife over the meaning of its doctrines — a hazard given what Chesterton called America’s “amazing ambition” to make “a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles.”

A moment’s pause to pay respects to the loveliness of forebears’ sacrifice and bravery won’t restore the special feeling of former times. But it’s not too much for our gallant dead to ask.