It is the anniversary of D-Day. President Joe Biden, in Normandy, France, for ceremonial commemorations today, talked of the bravery and sacrifices of that titanic invasion, of the values that were at stake, and of the alliances that triumphed. It was an effective speech.
There may seem no connection between this and a Delaware court appearance by Hallie Biden, widow of the president’s elder son Beau and former girlfriend of his younger son Hunter, which is taking place on the same day. But one fact in the Hunter Biden case recalls memories for me inextricably tied to D-Day. It is that Hallie Biden tossed a gun belonging to Hunter into a dumpster.
It reminds me of looking down a granite cliff as a boy a generation after D-Day at big German guns rusting on the rocks below where they had been tipped into the sea by Jersey islanders celebrating Germany’s defeat and their own liberation.
Jersey, where I was born and went to school, is in a small archipelago close to France in the Bay of Cherbourg. It lies on the western side of the Cherbourg Peninsula, on the other side of which are Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches, where the Allies landed before battling their way to Berlin.
The landings cut off supply lines to the islands, and for nine months, while the Allies fought across France, Jersey was left isolated in German hands. Freeing the islands had no strategic value and would have cost many lives, so the Allies just waited until the Germans surrendered and took them with hardly a shot.
D-Day used to prompt mixed reactions on the islands. It was recognized as a necessary step toward German defeat, but it brought nine months of increasing hardship as food and other vital supplies ran ever lower. Every boy at my school knew that our aged gym master had suffered as a result; lacking proper equipment, surgeons had to stitch him up in makeshift fashion after an emergency operation to remove his appendix. He was gut hurt ever after.
The Germans had turned the islands into fortresses with big guns bristling from reinforced concrete bunkers on every effective promontory on the shore. We schoolboys used to explore the bunkers and would occasionally find treasures such as old military webbing or empty ammunition clips.
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Even a generation after the war, army surplus stores in the little town of St. Helier still had a reasonable stock of wartime bric-a-brac and abandoned military paraphernalia. Wehrmacht helmets were prized as treasures and hard to find, but there were a fair number of gray German uniform tunics that boys would buy and wear ironically with jeans after — it being the hippie early 1970s — embroidering them with mushrooms and other psychedelic emblems of that epoch.
That was only 25 years after the war had ended, and now we are 80 years past the massive Normandy operations that were perhaps the most decisive step toward defeating the Nazis. Rolling the Germans back across France shaped the lives of the veterans who gathered at Omaha Beach to hear the president. The aftermath of German occupation shaped my own boyhood, too.
