Honouring the brave

THEY came together for one last walk with old comrades and the ghosts of their brothers who stayed forever young.

They're smaller now these survivors of the Longest Day. Frail, stooped, white-haired and wide-girthed are the great liberators today. They hobble more than march, deep breaths puff out their cheeks and many need a stick, an arm or a chair to fight the ravages of time.

But they still have razor-sharp creases in their trousers and shoes they can see their lined faces in. Their barrel chests still fill with pride at the medals they bear. Medals which set them apart from us lesser men who will never be tested the same. They still attempt a ram-rod back, the chins still jut. They may be slower of foot than they were when they raced from their boats 60 years ago into ferocious German fire but there is still the same determined steel in their stride.

And as the survivors, now in their 80s and 90s, defied the heat of the French sun to officially walk together for the last time in front of the sands of Arromanches, they still looked like the callow young men who landed here to free the world from an awful tyranny.

A look that can only be described as throat-tighteningly, heart-thumpingly magnificent.

To be in the small Normandy town of Arromanches yesterday was to witness a haunting communion of the living and the dead honouring the finest generation of men any of us will ever know.

Up on the cliffs where, on June 6th 1944, German troops watched helplessly as the greatest-ever seaborne invasion unfolded, the Queen in blue suit and hat, sat alongside Jacques Chirac, George Bush, and Vladimir Putin. Tony and Cherie Blair were relegated to the cheap seats just behind.

A historic gathering of the most powerful figures on earth, feted by today's marching bands and battalions like our own Light Dragoons and Royal Hussars, given spectacular fly-pasts by 50 planes from six countries, including the Red Arrows, and shown a moving montage of footage from the grimmest days of the Second World War.

It was historic not simply because it is the last time there will be a large-scale, official commemoration of this astonishing military operation but because sitting next to Tony Blair was German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. The first time a German leader has attended such an event, to remember the 7,000 German troops who died that day, and to show old rivalries have no place in modern Europe.

It was a point picked up by President Chirac in his speech at Arromanches. "The wind of peace, reconciliation and freedom is blowing across Europe, reunited at last," he said.

"For several decades now, the bitter enemies of the past have been building their present and looking to the future together. With respect for history, the soldiers, the suffering and the blood that was shed, we are celebrating together the victory of peace and democracy."

Of the Brits he said: "You are a heroic nation that long held out alone. A nation that, as the last archipelago of liberty, took in those who refused defeat and humiliation, those who carried the flame of hope."

BUT it was the ranks of assembled veterans whom he called "children of the world thrown so young into the war of fire", who received his most heart-felt thanks.

President Chirac said: "To you, admirable symbols of courage and devotion, of honour and nobility, of duty and supreme selflessness. On behalf of all French men and women I express our gratitude, pride and admiration. We are beholden to your struggle."

The president was right. They, the heads of state, were yesterday's bit-part players, as they patted each other's backs, turned up embarrassingly late (George Bush had an entourage of 16 buses and four minibuses to get up the hill) and basked in the reflected glory of an earlier generation whose courage they will never be asked to match.

They took a 21-gun salute from a French frigate a mile out in a Channel that was calm and glistening - the opposite of how it looked on that bloody day 60 years earlier. And then it was time for the heroes to take centre stage.

To the soundtrack of the film The Longest Day, 142 of them from all 14 countries which took part in D-Day marched together. They came in no order of rank or country. They landed together on the 50-miles of Normandy beaches these squaddies and generals and that was how they would walk.

On the huge screens we saw black-and-white images of the men barely out of their teens when they took these cliffs from the Germans.

In front of them we saw them as they are today. Old men in blazers and berets, with rows of medals ablaze on their chests, some on sticks, in wheelchairs, or almost blind.

A few of the old boys were overcome by the magnitude of it all, but the vast majority left the tears to the audience. Their thoughts were on the beach behind them, with the 2,500 men who died on that grey June morning in 1944.

Concentrating on the faces of the pals who fell, images frozen forever in youth. Their eyes tightened. So did their throats. Those deep, deep thoughts of D-Day were resurfacing.

Back then the beach of Arromanches was a carpet of deadly scarlet. A red sea filled with carnage of the abattoir and the stench of burning flesh, explosives and fear. Now it was smooth and beige, a gentle sea glistening below blue skies.

But the reminders were still there. Those huge lumps of concrete called the Mulberry Harbours, stood as defiantly as the old fellows themselves. Bobbing between them were a few of the 6,939 ships which took part that day.

And above them flew two Spitfires and a Dakota, the aircraft out of which came the 23,500 paratroopers dropped on D-Day.

Fourteen veterans, one from each country was presented with the Legion D'Honneur by President Chirac. Patrick Churchill, an 80-year-old former radio commander - married to a German woman who survived the blanket-bombing of Dresden - received the British one.

How they loved it these proud old men who did such fine things. Men who shame those leaders who so easily commit youngsters to war, and politicians who would wish to see Europe plunged back into political disarray.

A choir from Caen University gave us a half-hour artistic interpretation of the war. They reminded us how the darkness descended in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power, and lasted 11 long years, until the victors of D-Day initiated the beginning of the end.

Watching with stiff lips were the liberators. More than any other band of brothers these were the ones who brought the curtain down on Hitler's evil. The ones who went for the jugular of the Nazi beast.

As scenes from concentration camps hit the screens, it was hard not to look at the German chancellor. Many did. He was deep in thought, weighed down by a burden Germans want to shed. When the ceremony ended with Beethoven's Ode To Joy, it hinted at reconciliation, and a shared destiny.

It was fitting because this commemoration was as much about looking forward as back. As Gerhard Schroeder said of his invitation acceptance: "This is hugely symbolic. It means the Second World War is finally over."

AT THE end of the ceremony, world leaders jostled to shake Mr Bush's hand. Tony Blair got in there quickly, fixing the president with a huge, sycophantic smile and saying "well done".

It was hard to say what Bush had done well, apart from ruin the timing and chew gum while trying to look mournful.

At the centre of Arromanches thousands of members of Normandy Veterans Association were getting ready to march before the Queen.

The men in the red berets of the Parachutists, green of the commandos and black of infantry, had spent the previous days meeting up with old pals, reminiscing in the towns they'd liberated and holding each other as they wept at the graves of those who fell.

Then they'd made their way through the twisted picturesque lanes past the milestones that signify the Allied advance, to Arromanches. For the final mass pilgrimage.

Blair, along with Cherie (sporting the latest Chanel sunglasses) Michael Howard, Charles Kennedy, Nicholas Soames and Geoff Hoon, pressed the flesh of wheelchair-bound veterans unable to take part in the march-past.

Then at 5.30, on the dot (America take note) the bands of the King's Division and Royal Irish led the thousands of marchers into the town square with bearers of flags from every British unit that landed on D-Day held aloft.

They fell-in, four-deep as the crowds penned back on the pavement applauded wildly. Women whose husbands are no longer alive marched proudly with their loved ones' medals.

The bands played marching songs then numbers we've heard that generation sing over bottles of stout for 60 years: Old Comrades, It's A Long Way To Tipperary, Colonel Bogey.

All the marchers clutched a white bag containing a bottle of water, given to stop them dehydrating. Few looked like they were going to dignify their medical needs by reaching for bottle, mid-march. They'd been here before you see, when the going was much heavier and they were not going to wilt now. That would be letting down the lads who didn't come back.

These are a special breed of men. Living monuments to arguably the greatest day in British military history. Certainly the last history-changing operation in which British forces will play such a vital part.

Those of us who watched on humbly can never know what they saw. But we who benefit from their unswerving heroism know there probably was no more just a war for a Briton to fight in than the one that toppled the Nazis.

Those veterans are the embodiment of the Unknown Soldier, the finest, the strongest of men. The strangers who put everything on the line to give us the cushiest of lives.

A line may finally have been drawn in the sand of Arromanches but the memory of what these men did for us, and why they did it, should never be allowed to leave us.

D-Day: The last march

By John Lichfield, Terri Judd and Cahal Milmo in Normandy

The longest day has ended at last. Of all the heart-rending moments in yesterday's 60th anniversary commemorations of the Normandy landings, the most poignant was the sight of British veterans walking away from an open-air service in Bayeux carrying their flags slung casually over their shoulders with all the weariness of their 80 years and more.

Their last parade? This will not, of course, be the final time that D-Day is remembered, but it will be the final time so many of the veterans of 6 June 1944 - British, American, Canadian, Polish and French, and, yes, German - gather in such impressive numbers on the Normandy coast.

Harry Brooke, 81, from Sheffield, who landed and fought with the 3rd Paratroop Brigade on D-Day, said: "We are the survivors of the survivors. You won't see so many of us next time around and, in many cases, we won't ever see our old comrades again. That's what makes this so special."

When 1,000 members of the British Normandy Veterans' Association (NVA) marched past the Queen last night at Arromanches, it was officially the "last" march of the NVA: the last patrol of a band of brothers who started their journey on ships and landing craft and aircraft on the south coast of England six decades ago.

Hundreds of their American compatriots, veterans of Omaha and Utah beaches gathered at the American military cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer to hear President George Bush deliver a moving tribute to the young men from the prairie towns and city streets of America who crossed an ocean to throw back the marching, mechanised evils of fascism. "Those young men did it," he told the American veterans and their families assembled amid the sweeping lines of 9,387 white tombstones at the cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach. "You did it."

Mr Bush paused to pay tribute to the "courage" and "leadership" of President Ronald Reagan, the man he so much resembles in style, who died on Saturday.

Events also intruded - jarringly - in other ways. President Jacques Chirac gave a touching speech, just before President Bush, in which he expressed "in the name of every French man and woman ... my nation's eternal gratitude and the unparalleled debt our democracies owe. I salute their courage, that flight of the human soul which, by their refusal to acknowledge the inevitability of enslavement, altered the course of history and so conferred a new stature on mankind, nations and people. They are now our sons also," M. Chirac said.

However, he could not resist taking a diplomatic dig at President Bush by adding that the Second World War Allies had fought "in defence of a certain conception of mankind, a certain vision of the world: the vision that lies at the heart of the United Nations charter". In other words, the US and Britain had blurred that "vision" by fighting a non-UN approved war in Iraq last year. President Bush, in turn, took an oblique dig at the French by ending his speech with the words: "America would do it again - for our friends."

The two presidents had, in theory, narrowed their differences over the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty in talks in Paris on Saturday, but not obliterated them, it seems. Both might usefully have listened to the English woman who chided two press photographers when they shoved and swore at each other as they jostled for position at an event commemorating the British airborne landings on Saturday. "Shush, hush, for shame," she said. "How can you? At an event like this?"

More than a million people are believed to have flocked to Normandy at the weekend to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the largest - and most momentous - amphibian invasion in history. Although precise numbers are difficult to establish, there were thought to be 10,000 British veterans alone.

The presence of 17 heads of state and government, including the Queen, Tony Blair and - for the first time at a D-Day celebration - the German leader, Gerhard Schröder, made yesterday a frustrating day for many visitors. A blanket of suffocating and officious security had been imposed on the entire 60 miles of the D-Day coast and up to 20 miles inland. The main "international" celebration of the invasion on the cliffs above Arromanches became a pompous and stilted affair, scripted by the demands of television and the threat of terrorism. President Chirac awarded the Légion d'Honneur to selected veterans of all Allied nations. President Bush looked bored.

Overall, there was, for some people, too much marching by serving soldiers; too many military bands and fly-pasts; too much gold-braid; too many flags. But how do you find the right language, or theatre, to celebrate something as terrible, but as necessary, as D-Day?

Many of the smaller events caught the spirit of comradeship and sacrifice better, suchas the extraordinarily moving ceremony on the ridge marking the north edge of the D-Day battlefield on Saturday when 400 veterans of the British 3rd Parachute Brigade (out of the original 2,200) marched past the commander, Brigadier James Hill, 93, the most senior surviving Allied commander of the war. The main British commemoration yesterday, at the British military cemetery in Bayeux, with 4,165 graves from the Normandy campaign, was also a powerfully moving. The Queen and President Chirac presented an enormous wreath of poppies, wrapped in the colours of the British monarchy and the French Republic.

Something like 1,000 British veterans marched past the graves of their comrades and a Latin inscription that translates: "We, once conquered by William, have liberated William's native land." English hymns drifted in the bright sunshine; a bugler played "Reveille" and the "Last Post". (The sun was too warm for some: three veterans had to be treated in hospital after the ceremony.) Later, at the international ceremony at Arromanches, M. Chirac paid individual tributes to all the Allied nations, including "the United Kingdom, a heroic nation that long held out alone ... a nation that, as the last archipelago of liberty, took in those who refused defeat and humiliation".

Perhaps the most moving of all the speeches of the day was given by Gerhard Schröder, at a Franco-German commemoration in Caen last night. Mr Schröder, born in 1944, recalled that his father had been killed fighting in Romania and his family had only discovered the grave four years ago.

"We Germans know we unleashed this heinous war," he said. "We recognise the responsibility our history has laid upon us and we take it seriously ... It is not the Germany of those dark years I represent here today. My country has returned to the fold of civilised nations ... Thousands of Allied soldiers ... paid the ultimate price for freedom. German soldiers died because they had been sent on a murderous campaign to crush Europe. But in death soldiers were united, regardless of the uniform they wore."

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=529028

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