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World Leaders and Veterans to Gather at D-Day Beaches Obama Honors Moment of Liberation in Normandy
(about 5 hours later)
LONDON — Global leaders including President Obama and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, prepared to join hundreds of veterans on the Normandy beaches on Friday to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings that changed the course of World War II. COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France — At a time of renewed tension harking back to a darker era, the leaders of the United States, Canada, Europe and Russia put aside their differences for a few hours on Friday to honor the moment decades ago when their predecessors joined forces to liberate a continent from tyranny.
Memories of the most ambitious amphibious landing in history generally inspire emotional tributes to the almost 160,000 Allied soldiers who swarmed ashore on June 6, 1944, from choppy waters in the face of withering German fire to capture the five beaches, code-named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. President Obama came together with a parade of kings and queens and prime ministers to mark the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landing that sent young men storming onto the forbidding beaches of northern France amid a hail of fire in perhaps the greatest invasion in human history. Even with the distance of time, the heroism of that day had the power to overshadow, however briefly, the schisms of today.
“People of my generation just find it hard to believe what people of my grandfather’s generation did to ensure that we can all live in freedom,” Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said just after midnight on Friday as he attended the first event of the commemoration at Pegasus Bridge, on the Orne River. “What more powerful manifestation of America’s commitment to human freedom than the sight of wave after wave after wave of young men boarding those boats to liberate people they had never met?” Mr. Obama asked, standing before some of a dwindling corps of survivors on a stage at the American Cemetery and Memorial just above Omaha Beach. “We say it now as if it couldn’t be any other way. But in the annals of history, the world had never seen anything like it.”
At that place, airborne British troops in gliders seized bridges to protect the beachheads hours before the amphibious landing, under the command of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, began as light dawned over the shore. The ceremony came as Europe is once again inflamed over the forcible seizing of territory and redrawing of the map. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its widely believed intervention in eastern Ukraine have drawn comparisons to the early moves by Nazi Germany in the years leading up to World War II, and President Vladimir V. Putin has been compared to Adolf Hitler by figures like former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Prince Charles of Britain.
“When you hear the stories of people coming back again, in their 90s, and what they did, and how brave they were, how many people they lost,” Mr. Cameron said, “it just is incredibly humbling.” However awkward it promised to be, Mr. Putin was invited here for the commemoration by President François Hollande of France, just as Russian leaders have attended past anniversaries to pay tribute to the indispensable Soviet role in defeating Hitler’s Germany. Mr. Putin did not participate in the Omaha Beach ceremony, but he was scheduled to attend a private lunch of the various leaders, the first time he and Mr. Obama will be in the same place since the confrontation over Ukraine erupted several months ago.
American troops came ashore at Utah and Omaha beaches. Among the 4,500 Allied deaths that day, military historians say, were some 2,500 Americans. Although they agreed to suspend Russia from the Group of 8 major powers after the annexation of Crimea, Mr. Hollande, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany each scheduled individual meetings with Mr. Putin while he was in France on Thursday and Friday. Mr. Obama, by contrast, refused to meet with Mr. Putin, but aides did not rule out an unscripted conversation between the two men during the lunch.
At a time when American attention has been focused on the fate of a single soldier captured in Afghanistan, the commemoration is likely to recall the vast scale and the huge, human odds at play during D-Day. As they entered the chateau where the lunch was being held, Mr. Putin and Petro O. Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president-elect, talked briefly. It was the first interaction between the two since Mr. Poroshenko’s election late last month.
“It was a killing field,” Harry Billinge, 88, a British veteran, told the BBC. “I hope they will not forget the poor devils that died here.” The commemoration of the Normandy invasion also comes at a time when the United States is reaching rather less-satisfying conclusions to two other wars waged over the last dozen years. Just last week, Mr. Obama announced that he would withdraw virtually all forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2016 shortly before leaving office, much as he previously pulled out of Iraq. But neither war came with a definitive moment of triumph like that in Europe decades ago.
The landings opened the invasion of northwestern Europe as the Soviet Red Army pushed toward Berlin from the east. French civilians also suffered heavy losses. The president accepted the resignation of his veterans affairs secretary amid a furor over poor treatment of returning service members. And Mr. Obama reached a deal with the Taliban in which he agreed to release five of its imprisoned leaders in exchange for the only American soldier held captive in Afghanistan, a trade that has touched off a roiling debate back home.
The defeat of Nazism led to Europe’s division into hostile ideological camps, and to the Cold War — the rivalry between Moscow and Washington that many analysts say has been revived by the events in Ukraine. That crisis has preoccupied current leaders as they prepare for the D-Day ceremonies. Mr. Obama addressed none of that in his speech. For historic occasions like the D-Day anniversary, White House aides prefer to keep controversies of the moment out of the president’s speech, so that decades later when their successors look back, it feels rooted in posterity rather than transitory and often forgettable controversies like the release of the soldier, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.
Mr. Putin’s presence at the commemorative events starting in Paris on Thursday evening offered him an opportunity to hold his first meetings with Western leaders since his annexation of Crimea and the eruption of conflict between government forces and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. But Mr. Obama did rhetorically link the legendary “greatest generation” to the men and women who are returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan. At one point, he introduced a few of the D-Day survivors in the audience to some of today’s veterans, including Sgt. First Class Cory Remsburg, whom he met at a previous anniversary here five years ago and who was later nearly killed in a blast in Afghanistan.
While some Western leaders, including Mr. Cameron, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President François Hollande of France, scheduled meetings with Mr. Putin, there was no immediate plan for Mr. Obama to meet formally with the Russian leader. “This generation, this 9/11 generation of service members, they, too, felt something tug,” the president said. “They answered some call. They said, ‘I’ll go.’ They too chose to serve a cause that’s greater than self, many even after they knew they’d be sent into harm’s way. And for more than a decade, they have endured tour after tour.”
Mr. Hollande also plans to try to broker a first encounter between Mr. Putin and Ukraine’s president-elect, Petro O. Poroshenko. It was a day of somber pageantry under a sunny, cloudless sky, with honor guards and the playing of the French and American national anthems. Mr. Obama met privately beforehand with seven D-Day veterans, some of them in wheelchairs or with canes, several wearing medals.
Mr. Obama, visiting Europe this week, has been trying to persuade Western allies, most of which have powerful economic bonds with Moscow, to maintain pressure on Mr. Putin over Ukraine. Also expected for the lunch were Queen Elizabeth II of Britain, who was a young princess during the war, as well as the kings or queens of Belgium, Denmark, Holland and Norway; the presidents or prime ministers of Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Poland and Slovakia; the grand duke of Luxembourg, and the governor-general of New Zealand.
On Friday, the showcase international event grouping at least 18 foreign leaders along with the veterans and spectators is to be held on Sword Beach, near the village of Ouistreham at its eastern extremity. The D-Day anniversary has become a regular stop on the presidential itinerary, but it was not always that way. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general who led the invasion, did not consider it a moment to celebrate 10 years later when he was president, and so all he did was issue a simple written statement.
The dignitaries are to have lunch nearby at the 18th-century Château de Bénouville. During the war, the building was used as a maternity hospital whose director, Léa Vion, achieved renown for sheltering downed Allied aircrews and supporting the French Resistance. Ronald Reagan was the first to visit on an anniversary and make it an occasion when he showed up in 1984, and his ode to heroism came to be remembered as a singular moment during his presidency. While Reagan recalled the Normandy invasion in the context of the Cold War that followed, Bill Clinton came 10 years later at a moment when the world was grappling with the new order that emerged with the fall of the Soviet empire.
The lunch is expected to offer diplomatic tripwires, not least between Mr. Putin and Prince Charles of Britain, the heir to the throne, who is attending the events along with his mother, Queen Elizabeth II. George W. Bush followed 10 years after that, on the day after Reagan died, as it happened, and linked the struggles of 1944 to the fresh challenges in Iraq. With the veterans of D-Day increasingly departing the scene, Mr. Obama did not wait for another decade to come, and participated in the 65th anniversary five years ago.
The prince was recently quoted in British newspapers as comparing Russia’s actions in Ukraine to the behavior of Nazi Germany in Central Europe. The first president neither alive during the invasion nor born shortly after the war when memories were fresh, Mr. Obama on Friday found a personal connection through his grandfather, who served under Gen. George S. Patton. And he singled out by name three D-Day veterans in attendance: Wilson Colwell, who jumped with the 101st Airborne at age 16; Harry Kulkowitz, who fudged his age and came ashore at Utah Beach; and Rock Merritt, who became a paratrooper after seeing a recruitment poster asking if he was man enough.
“Fewer of us have parents and grandparents to tell us about what the veterans of D-Day did here 70 years ago,” Mr. Obama said. “So we have to tell their stories for them.”