Draft Dodger D-day tribute

Seventy-five years ago today, my father was flying along the Normandy coast taking photographs of what was happening on the beaches below, as the D-day landing forces struggled to get a foothold on the French mainland.

He was particularly impressed by the bombardment being thrown at the German defences by the big ships in the Channel. Even from several thousand feet up, the sight was chilling.

“All I could think,” he told us, “was how glad I wasn’t down there on the receiving end of that.”

The D-day beaches from the air

The war still had nearly a year to run in Europe, over a year to run in the Far East. But when those soldiers landed in France, a great turning point was at last reached. From then on, the road to Berlin and the final defeat of Nazism was open and, though it would prove bumpy with some nasty surprises along the way, ultimately the Allies would not be stopped travelling down it.

Today international leaders have met again on those beaches to honour the men who fought and in many cases were injured or died there.

We are now so far from that time that none of the leaders present are of an age to have served at that time. But one in particular could have served in another war. Here’s what he told the British journalist Piers Morgan about why he didn’t go to Vietnam:

Well I was never a fan of that war. I'll be honest with you. I thought it was a terrible war.

So far so good. I frankly couldn’t disagree with him. It was a senseless war, in which huge numbers died for absolutely no benefit to anyone, either American or Vietnamese. I wouldn’t have wanted to serve there either.

But Donald Trump – for, as you guessed, it was he – didn’t stop there. He went on:

Nobody ever – you're talking about Vietnam at that time and nobody ever heard of the country.

He’s citing ignorance as the basis for not joining his country’s war in Vietnam? He’s saying that he didn’t object in principle to a “terrible war”, he just had no idea what it was about. And, indeed, he took no stand on principle at all.

Now I wasn't out in the streets marching. I wasn't saying, you know, I'm going to move to Canada, which a lot of people did. But no, I was not a fan of that war.

Not a fan? But not enough of an opponent to do anything about it?

The Illinois Democrat, Senator Tammy Duckworth, replied succinctly:

I don't know anyone who has served in uniform, especially in combat, who would say they are a fan of war. In fact, I opposed the Iraq war, but volunteered to go when my unit was deployed.

What price did she pay? She lost both legs in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. In uniform.

Trump, on the other hand, swung himself a medical discharge from Vietnam, something which far poorer people, many no doubt far less well than he, didn’t have the means to obtain for themselves. It seems he was unfit to serve because of bone spurs on both his feet.

Now he’d like some reflected glory so he has travelled to Normandy to the celebrations of the 75th anniversary of D-day. He probably sincerely believes that, despite his proclaimed ignorance and his real duplicity, his presence is honouring the men who fought and suffered for his freedom.

I bet some of them had bone spurs.

It’s a shame I can’t ask my father for his opinion of these curious events. Although I don’t have much trouble imagining what he might have said.

A lovely city. An excellent meal. Great conversation. And some invaluable insights

The soft glow of gaslights in Zagreb's Upper Town

It’s curious being back in a country I haven’t visited for over half a century. 

A lot has changed. Starting with its name. Back then, it was just a constituent republic of a state called Yugoslavia. Today, it’s the independent republic of Croatia.

My first visit was in 1964. Among the few memories that have remained with me was the port of Dubrovnik, with three US warships docked in it. Even at eleven years old, it struck me as fascinating to see a ‘Communist’ nation hosting the US navy. It was testament to Tito’s wit in playing off the great powers against each other, as it was to a more intelligent side of US foreign policy, cultivating better relations with a supposedly enemy power, rather than going to war with it as in Vietnam.

After all, the US won the game in Yugoslavia. Vietnam inflicted their first ever defeat on them.

Flower market in Zagreb's old centre

We did get to Zagreb in 1964, but only to the suburbs. I remember a good lunch and little else. That made it all the more pleasurable to discover how much the city has to offer, as our friend Ana showed us around it on this visit. A beautiful old centre with a huge market offering every imaginable ware, streets offering fine prospects at every turn and glorious views from an upper town whose streets are still lit by gas in the evenings.

Roofs and spires, seen from the Upper Town

It’s a fine, and above all European, city. And the lunch was as good as back then.

With Danielle (left) and Ana
And Marija Juric Zagorka, Croatia's first female journalist

But our conversation was even more interesting than the city.

I’d already discovered in Valencia than when people talk about ‘the war’ they don’t mean the same thing everywhere. In Britain, France or Germany, it generally means the Second World War. In Spain, it’s the war against Franco’s Fascists in the late 1930s. But with a chill up my spine, I realised that when Ana speaks of ‘the war’ she means something that she suffered directly herself, where she saw and heard air raids coming in over the city in which she lives.

She’s talking of the war the Serb-led Yugoslav army waged against Croatia to prevent its becoming independent.

‘Not a civil war,’ she assures us, ‘because Croatian forces never set a foot on Serbian territory. It was a war started by the Serbs and fought in self-defence by the Croatians.’

We first met Ana in Strasbourg. She reminded us of the quaint habit there of sounding air raid warnings at noon on the first Wednesday of every month, as a test of their civil defence readiness. The first time she heard it, she froze with terror at hearing the familiar wail with its blood-curdling associations. Only when a colleague realised what was happening to her and explained that it was only a test of equipment, was she able to regain her composure.

To me, such memories belong to my parents’ generation, not mine. And certainly not to Ana’s: she’s significantly younger than we are.

‘For years,’ she told us, ‘I wasn’t allowed to be Croatian. The state tried to force us all to be Yugoslavs, but we never were and never wanted to be.’

The right to self-determination was asserted for all peoples after the First World War. In Yugoslavia, as in Czechoslovakia and other nations, it was never truly applied. Only now can Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins and even Kosovans at last begin to live their own lives, free of the authoritarian tutelage of Belgrade.

Bosnia and Herzegovina remains a mess, of course. Something Ana feels particularly strongly, as she was born there – only 200 metres from the Croatian border, but still inside Herzegovina. For now, there’s a fragile peace, but it’s hard to know whether it will strengthen in the future or break down into renewed conflict.

And what about Croatia itself? Doesn’t Ana fear a new outbreak of hostilities?

‘I don’t think so. After all, we’re members of NATO now.’

At a time when it’s fashionable to write NATO off as the work of the devil – a position shared by Donald Trump and the far left – it’s a salutary reminder that there are people who rely on it for the defence of their freedoms. Maybe the organisation, for its many faults, isn’t entirely without redeeming features.

Nor is it the only international organisation to which Croatia belongs. Another, as important as NATO, is the EU. Coming here is a useful reminder that one of the major purposes of the EU, far greater than its economic role, is to begin to put an end to violence between states, at least in Europe. That’s a continent that has seen more than enough blood flowing from its internal strife down the centuries.

Right up to as recently as the 1990s in former Yugoslavia.

Croexit? No thanks
The Croatian flag flies with pride next to the EU’s

Croatia’s proud of being in the EU. I wish more people in the UK could understand that. Before they undermine the organisation and deprive themselves of its benefits by an intemperate, ill-thought out and self-harming Brexit.

Obama and Peace. And what comes next

Do you remember when Barack Obama won the Nobel peace prize?

It was in October 2009. His inauguration as US President had taken place the previous January. He’d barely got his feet under the table, had hardly begun to feel his way into the job, had yet to achieve more than the already considerable feat of getting elected into that office despite being partly black.

“What’s the peace prize committee up to?” most of us wondered, “usually they honour people who’ve actually made some major contribution to peace. Are they issuing prizes for potential now, then?”

Seven years on, it’s the prize committee that looks smart, we their sceptical critics who look foolish. Insight, they showed, and above all foresight. Obama has done far more for peace, and above all far less for war, than has become the norm for Presidents since the end of the Second World War.

It’s true he wanted to go blundering into Syria, missiles blazing, but he had the good sense to be talked out of that. He kept his intervention in Libya to a minimum. He did all he could to pull troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and resisted the temptation to put more in, able to rise above the simplistic pursuit of quick fixes by military means for which Dubya Bush – and, indeed, Tony Blair – so naively fell.

He’s also shown an ability to break free from a toxic mindset. Most nations have fixations with certain issues on which they find it practically impossible to change their view. In the US, the most significant seem to be a conviction that no black can be fully the equal of a white – indeed, for many, that blacks can’t come close to equality, that force is the best approach to foreign policy, and that the widespread possession of guns protects society, instead of being the principal contributing factor to a world-leading murder rate.

Obama has shown the first of these obsessions to be wholly false, just by being who he is. The third he has never ceased to combat, even in these, the dying months of his presidency. And for the second, he has shown that the US can do better by befriending some of its enemies, without denying disagreements, than by maintaining an aggressive stance towards them.

He became the first sitting US President to visit Cuba since the revolution. The US may have a long list of grievances against Havana, and many may even be justified, but an open door leads to more hope of progress than a closed one – if only because you can talk through it, negotiate through it, even argue through it.

He recently visited Vietnam too. There’s plenty wrong in that country, above all the repression of opposition to the regime and all the usual paraphernalia of autocracy: censorship, excessive surveillance, denial of human rights. But the longest war the US has fought, and the first it has lost, achieved absolutely nothing but death and destruction in Vietnam. It’s good to see other attitudes being reinforced.

Of course, there’s a paradox: Obama’s gesture of peace towards Vietnam took the form of authorising the sale of arms to the nation… Still, it was a gesture that would cement a growing friendship, and suggests a growing trust.

Finally, Obama became the first serving US President to visit Hiroshima and the Peace Park, monument to the first of only two times that atomic weapons have ever been used. We need to remember, when we cry about the weapons of mass destruction, that the US alone has used them in anger, killing over 140,000 people immediately in Hiroshima (others died later of diseases caused by the bomb). To set some perspective, 2014 was a peak year for terrorist deaths – they reached nearly 33,000 around the world.

Barack Obama with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe
with the A-Bomb dome in the background

The Peace Park is one of the most moving places I have ever visited. It maintains a powerful sense of peace, but also of sorrow, even of awe, at what was done there. A prayer bell stands as a symbol of the horror that any faith must have feel at the atrocity booming mournfully when another visitor sounds it; nearby are glass cases full of paper cranes (the birds, not the construction plant – don’t be silly) in memory, initially, of the girl who started making them in the ultimately vain hope that it would prevent her death from leukaemia, and now in memory of all the victims of war; and standing over all, visible again and again as one wanders the paths, grim and awe-inspiring is the A-bomb dome, the strange building that somehow remained standing though choked with rubble (which has been left where it fell) while all the people inside it were killed.

Now Obama has been there, as the official representative of the nation that wreaked the destruction. And in that hallowed place, he spoke of his hope for a world that would ultimately free itself of nuclear weapons. Not probably in his lifetime, he told us, but eventually, as long as we keep pushing towards that goal.

Oh, yes, he’s a worthy recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He hadn’t shown it in his actions back then. But he has completely justified the faith of the Prize Committee.

Now we face the prospect of his successor being Donald Trump. The man not of the open door, but of the wall between peoples. The man who wants to make American great again, with a subtext of violence, domination, intolerance.

I don’t think he’ll be bothering the Nobel Peace Prize for their attention at all.

The anniversary of D-Day: might a little shame be appropriate?

Today, the seventieth anniversary of the D-day landings in Normandy, got me thinking about how we remember and respect our soldiers. 

In the US, the message is generally a variant on the theme “they gave their lives that we might be free”.

Do we exercise our freedom to pay for them?

Though other motivations also played their role, the Second World War genuinely removed a major threat to freedom. My grandfather refused to fight in the First World War and spent two years in gaol for his pains, but joined the Air Raid Precaution service (he was too old for combat) in the Second: as a Jew, he felt the fight against Nazism had to be won, where the Great War clash of imperialisms seemed no concern of his.

And since World War 2? The Vietnam War? The invasion of Iraq? I’m not sure how they served freedom. It was by defeating the United States that the Vietnamese gained some freedom. And it’s not clear how replacing a vicious but stable Iraqi dictatorship by a war-torn regime prey to vicious terrorists, and under the domination of Iran, serves any cause of freedom.

To suggest solders “died for freedom” in those wars seems a travesty. But it isn’t just the word “freedom” that bothers me in that phrase. It’s also the word “died”, because huge numbers of soldiers don’t die, though, sadly, many of them come later to wish they had. War memorials show the names of the dead; they don’t name the crippled either in body or, far worse, in soul.

Fit, young, brave and strong: in short, heroes

Americans like to produce uplifting, inspiring images of soldiers, with messages of gratitude and admiration for them. The soldiers appear as heroes: fit, young, brave and strong. We don’t see the far less heroic picture many present a few years later: unkempt, sleeping rough, their minds addled by drink or drugs, estranged from friends or families. Many of them are in prison: in Britain and the US, a disproportionate number of convicted criminals are veterans.

And, above all, these fallen heroes receive little or no support from the society that salutes them so warmly while they’re still well.

Perhaps our war memorials ought to contain inscriptions along the following lines:

“Private such-and-such, who died not in the fighting but nonetheless of its consequences, four decades later, uncared for, unloved and alone, abandoned by the society that claims to thank him for his sacrifice but feels no shame over its failure to rescue him.”

All this went through my mind as I listened to a radio interview with Tim Radford, now 85, but believed to have been the youngest person to have taken part in the D-Day landings. He was a fifteen-year old galley boy on a tug on 6 June 1944.

“There was a most tremendous bombardment taking place...” he told the BBC, “it was like Dante’s Inferno...”

“The water was full of dead men. A very sad memory of D-Day is all the poor devils who never made it to the beach, who were in the water with life jackets on, floating, and we hadn’t time to pull them out...”

For Radford, these weren’t scenes of glorious endeavour. In fact, he told us:

“I’m very much opposed to war as a means of settling differences, but there’s no question in my mind but that war had to be fought, we had to defeat Naziism otherwise we’d all be enslaved for generations.”

The war was justified, he felt, but nothing to exult over. And what about since then?

“... most of the wars there’ve been since, I can’t think of any exceptions, have seemed to me to be unnecessary and avoidable.”

So in his view, as in mine, they had little to do with any essential freedom that could not have been defended some other way.

Asked whether what he saw on 6 June 1944 had any glory to it, Radford was unambiguous:

“I don’t think it was glorious. You should respect the courage and self-sacrifice of people who give their lives for others. Of course. But there’s no glory in it.”

No. There isn’t. In Britain, we have what we call a ‘Covenant’ with our servicemen: we ask them to be ready to put their lives on the line for us, and in return we commit, firstly, not to call on them to do it except for a cause worthy of the sacrifice and, secondly, to look after them when they return (or of their families if they don’t).

In reality, we demand that sacrifice for reasons that are often at best dubious. And then we redouble the injury by failing to look after the ones who come back or the bereaved families.

That’s why all the rhetoric about our gratitude to those who died for our freedom disturbs me. It seems to me to draw a veil of sentimentalism over something much uglier that we ought to face up to. It’s a denial of behaviour on our parts, not theirs, for which we ought ultimately to be profoundly ashamed.

Perhaps a thought worth taking a few moments over on the anniversary of D-Day.