D-Day 77th anniversary: Those boys gave us our today

My God! They’re so young! That’s what first strikes you looking at the picture of American soldiers in a landing craft heading for the beaches of France on D-Day, 77 years ago yesterday.

They look like they should be out playing football, or enjoying a milkshake down at the local drug store, like teenagers do.

But there is one face whose cherubic innocence draws you to the middle of the frame.

He looks as though he doesn’t even shave and probably hasn’t yet fallen in love.

He and most of the others would have been dead, or gravely wounded, within hours – or minutes of hitting the beaches in France.

The opening scenes of the epic movie Saving Private Ryan bring home, with gut-punch realism, what it must have been like in the midst of the charnel house those beaches became on that day.

The wicked crack of bullets as they fly past; the sickening low-pitched sound they make as they tear into human flesh; the angry swarm-of-bees sounds deadly flying shrapnel makes.

The chaos, the noise, the blood. In that moment, suspended almost between life and death, the boys (that’s what they are) in the landing craft are in that most dangerous time in a soldier’s life: the time to think.

You wonder about your death. Will it be today? How will it happen? What will happen at home when they hear?

I remember that knot of apprehension, which dissipated in the dust from the wash of the chopper blades as we jumped down.

Then, there’s a job to do be done and you’d get on with it. Someone once called a British D-Day veteran “a hero” and he was quite miffed: “I’m not a hero. The heroes are dead. I’m alive.”

Yet, those thousands of young men who, as someone once said, gave up their tomorrows so we could enjoy our today, joined up to fight what they saw was a huge threat to the world.

Many from the “colonies” who really didn’t have any skin in the game in a war raging thousands of miles from their safe countries, didn’t think twice.

Like my uncle Mike, whose war ended after less than a year, when he was captured with hundreds of other South African soldiers after the defeat at Tobruk.

He spent four years in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, losing his toes to frostbite on an awful “death march”. He was a hero.

Even more so because, like the rest of his generation (and ours, too), he had to suppress his feelings and memories of that awful camp.

Cowboys don’t cry … but they can, and do, find solace in the bottle. D-Day is an Allied celebration.

In Russia, they still remember the 26 million Soviet citizens who died in that horrific conflict and the reality that it was them who stopped and then turned around the German war machine at the decisive battle of Stalingrad.

Talking to people at the Russian embassy in Pretoria recently, I was taken aback to hear that very few Soviet frontline soldiers made it home – just four out of every hundred survived.

Last month, more than 1.5 million Russians turned out in Moscow alone for the parade commemorating what the end of what they call The Great Patriotic War.

Every family in the country has people who died – and they won’t forget. We shouldn’t forget D-Day or the courage of the ordinary grunts.

We shouldn’t forget that, ultimately, whichever way you slice it, politicians were the cause.

Brendan Seery poses for a picture at The Citizen offices in Johannesburg, March 2021. Picture: Michel Bega