To me Memorial Day always brings one thing to mind, and this year with the 70th anniversary of D-Day coming June 6, that resonance is intensified by an order of magnitude.
On D-Day, the day of the launch of the Invasion of Normandy, my father was there at Omaha Beach. For him it was the experience of a lifetime, a transforming jolt into a vastly wider world, from being born and raised on a farm in Pretty Prairie, Kansas, to being a Navy lieutenant in the middle of one of the bloodiest battles in history, to marrying an English woman.
Because of that last fact, I was born. The Invasion of Normandy was the reason my father was in Southampton, England, to ever meet my mother in the first place. Without D-Day I would never have been born.
My earliest memories of my father were of the young, handsome war veteran who went to law school, practiced law and was elected probate judge in the city of Topeka when he was 26 years old. The war was still very present to him when I was a tiny kid and he bought me a plastic model of a Naval LST, the landing craft on which he rode into Omaha Beach. He also had a Nazi helmet and some strange goggles that allowed you to look into the sun without being blinded in case an air attack came in using direct sunlight as cover.
His attitude towards all of it was very positive. He was still carrying that gung-ho feeling that military people have to generate among themselves as a group when they undertake such a horrendous and daunting mission.
My impressions of him then and my memories of him now are of a charming, bright, cheerful, enthusiastic, kind young man. When the subject of the war came up, it was just as something he had done and was proud of and other people were proud of him for. I had not the slightest idea what it was he really went through.
Throughout my lifetime, as I have matured and learned more about the history, my appreciation for what happened there has grown, but I know that I can never really know what he went through there.
My father, Glenn Cogswell, commanded one of the small boats that went back and forth on the beach transporting infantry men from the LST, a ship so massive it could carry tanks as well as infantry battalions to shore. They drove into heavy resistance and thousands were killed on the beach.
But that was only one day. D-Day is just a soundbite. The invasion went on day after day after day. In 100 days, 600,000 men were moved onto Omaha Beach and 93,000 casualties were evacuated. My father was there for the duration, bound to stay until the war was over. By the end of the war he was in Scandinavia. My mom was his sweetheart waiting in England. That's how it all began for me.
Only in later years did I realize that the experience did take a toll on him. It wasn't just something that he went through and left behind as I had believed. His wife in the later decades of his life told me he had horrible nightmares from the experience. Apparently memories that were suppressed for a lifetime revisited his conscious mind much later.
In the early days, the dominating feeling of it all was just the triumph. We had won. We had turned back the Nazi juggernaut. We were the good guys against an enemy so despicable there could be no alternative but to fight to the death.
For my mother the war had already been going on a long time. She lived in Southampton, the southern port from which the invasion was planned and launched. It was a major military target for the Nazi air attacks of the Battle of Britain.
The German Luftwaffe hammered Southampton with 57 bombing raids and the citizens were terrorized through 1,500 alarms. My mother said in the morning you would get up and go out and see what buildings were destroyed and who had been killed. She said she had been shot at as a kid going to school.
Churchill had rallied the citizenry of Britain to prepare them for Hitler's Blitz saying, "Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the light of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'"
Even with this many years historical perspective, it's hard to deny the veracity of what Churchill said. The Invasion of Normandy was the answer to the proposition posed by Churchill. And though the operation was terribly flawed and botched and the people there took a terrible beating, they were ultimately successful.
And that generation came home and built the world we have enjoyed ever since. Let's wish that we may leave as good a legacy to those who follow us.
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