At D-Day Commemoration, Few Mourn The War’s Losers

time ^ | Vivienne Walt / La Cambe, France

[BenLurkin]

It may surprise the many Americans who have arrived in Normandy in France this week to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings, but the largest burial place here is not, in fact, the iconic U.S. war cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer about 10 miles from here. That site’s forest of sunlit, erect white crosses in perfectly symmetrical rows marks the graves of more than 9,387 Americans, memorialized for later generations in Hollywood movies, including the closing scene of the Tom Hanks hit, Saving Private Ryan.

Instead, among the many cemeteries for the 100,000 or so soldiers killed in the mammoth seaborne invasion on June 6, 1944 known as D-Day, and the three-month Battle for Normandy that followed, the biggest number of graves by far honor 21,222 soldiers who fought on the losing side: The Germans.

[MuttTheHoople]

21,222 soldiers who fought on the losing side: The Germans

Good. Better dead Germans than Dead Allies.

[jumpingcholla34]

Most of the German soldiers were just kids fed into the meat grinder. They had no air cover and precious little of anything else, so they died in wholesale lots. If their leaders had been worthy of them, they would have sued for peace long before D-Day.

Also, when we celebrate D-Day, let's spare a thought for the 10,000 or so French civilians killed in Allied bombing raids before the landings.

We won. Good for us. But all recollections of war, win or lose, should be somber affairs.

[pallmallman]

And many of them served as Hitler’s willing executioners in the “wild east”...Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estomis, and White Russia....side by side with the Einsatzgruppen.

[ops33]

When we went to Germany in 1979 we lived in a small village in the Saarland. I made friends with my neighbor who could speak very good English. He told me he learned to speak English in a British POW camp and that he was captured by the French partisans a couple of weeks after D Day. He thought the French were going to kill him but instead turned him over to the British. He also told me that on D Day he was assigned to a coastal artillery unit on one of the British beaches. Just like the German officer in “The Longest Day” who looks out his bunker to see the Allied ships from horizon to horizon, my neighbor had the same view. I recall him telling me that he was very scared. It was very interesting to listen to him tell his stories. We got to be pretty good friends and would sit in his garden and have a couple of beers. I always had the impression that he had never talked about his experiences to anyone. I didn’t pass judgment but rather just listened to him.