Obama pays homage to D-Day veterans

OMAHA BEACH, France| President Obama standing above the Normandy beaches where tens of thousands of Allied soldiers stormed ashore 65 years ago to begin an operation that cost nearly 10,000 American soldiers’ lives said Saturday that the D-Day invasion helped defeat Nazi Germany’s evil ideology bent on ruling the world.

Before a throng of elderly heroes some stooped, some in wheelchairs, nearly all white-haired the president said World War II brought a clarity of purpose, unlike the troubled state of the world today.

We live in a world of competing beliefs and claims about what is true. It is a world of varied religions and cultures and forms of government. In such a world, it’s all too rare for a struggle to emerge that speaks to something universal about humanity. The Second World War did that, he said.

For what we faced in Nazi totalitarianism was not just a battle of competing interests. It was a competing vision of humanity. Nazi ideology sought to subjugate, humiliate and exterminate. It perpetrated murder on a massive scale, fueled by a hatred of those who were deemed different and therefore inferior. It was evil.

At the start of the day, Mr. Obama met in nearby Caen with French President Nicolas Sarkozy. In an exchange with reporters, Mr. Obama indicated that he was considering stronger responses to what he called North Korean provocations.

The president said he preferred to stick to a diplomatic approach to North Korea after its nuclear and ballistic-missile tests, but showed growing impatience with North Korea and called those tests extraordinarily provocative.

Diplomacy has to involve the other side engaging in a serious way in trying to solve problems, he said. We are going to take a very hard look at how we move forward on these issues, and I don’t think that there should be an assumption that we will simply continue down a path in which North Korea is constantly destabilizing the region, and we just react in the same ways.

In Normandy, Mr. Obama spoke about the heroes of D-Day and, like American presidents before him Ronald Reagan on the 40th anniversary of the invasion, Bill Clinton on the 50th, George W. Bush on the 60th the president told personal stories of the bravery that day, and one about a man who did not live to see Saturday’s ceremony.

Jim Norene, a member of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, had come alone for one last anniversary, despite having stage-four advanced cancer.

Last night, after visiting this cemetery for one last time, he passed away in his sleep. Jim was gravely ill when he left his home, and he knew that he might not return. But just as he did 65 years ago, he came anyway. May he now rest in peace with the boys he once bled with, and may his family always find solace in the heroism he showed here, Mr. Obama said.

Unlike former presidents, however, Mr. Obama did not use the day to speak of the current state of the world. While Mr. Reagan explicitly referred to the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and Mr. Bush implicitly cited Iraq and the great alliance that is still needed today, Mr. Obama did not speak of the war against terrorism. Nor did he mention the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the struggle against al Qaeda, which seeks to expel U.S. forces from the region and spread fundamentalist Islamic rule. In his 16-minute speech, Mr. Obama returned again and again to the men, then just boys, who stormed the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944.

Friends and veterans, we cannot forget what we must not forget is that D-Day was a time and a place where the bravery and selflessness of a few was able to change the course of an entire century. At an hour of maximum danger, amid the bleakest of circumstances, men who thought themselves ordinary found within themselves the ability to do the extraordinary, he said.

Although the celebration has been held every 10 years, officials at the American cemetery moved for a 65th anniversary commemoration because so many WWII veterans are dying estimates run into the thousands each day. On what is considered U.S. soil, thousands gathered on a sunny day to mark the somber occasion and to praise the Allied effort that drove Adolf Hitler from power.

I wish, in the name of France, to pay homage to those of your children who shed their blood on Normandy ground and who rest there for eternity. We will never forget them, Mr. Sarkozy said. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper called D-Day the greatest achievement of the Greatest Generation, while British Prime Minister Gordon Brown who stumbled by calling Omaha Beach Obama Beach paid tribute to the sacrifice and valor of the men who fought there.

The ceremony included a 21-gun salute and a flyover by British, Canadian and U.S. jets, one of which broke formation to fly straight up in what is known as the missing man formation. Thousands of tiny U.S. and French flags, planted at the foot of 9,387 white marble tombstones some marked simply Identity Known Only to God” waved in the breeze. For perspective, nearly twice as many men died in a single day storming the French beaches than have died in Iraq during the six-year war there.

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