Normandy 1944/2026

One of the best parts of my job is that every few years I accompany a group of Princeton students to Normandy to see the sites where the American military landed in June of 1944, and then to follow the progress of their campaign through to the liberation of Paris. I do the trip in coordination with the university’s Army ROTC program. Half of the participants are cadets, and many of them will go on to military careers. The others are history majors or students enrolled in my lecture course on war in the modern Western world. This year, in the latter group, there were three military veterans. The ROTC Director, a serving army officer, does the lion’s share of the planning, while the students themselves take responsibility for presenting what happened at each site. I’m there to fill in general background, to talk about France during the war, and to provide translation services where needed, along with a French-speaking graduate student. Princeton being the privileged institution it is, a (very!) generous donor covers all our expenses. Each time, the trip has been an intensely moving and instructive experience and has also prompted thoughts about the present day.

This year a new site for me was Hill 314, well south of the landing beaches, where 700 soldiers from the US 30^th Infantry Division’s 2^nd Battalion, 120^th Regiment, held out for five desperate days in early August 1944 against the Germans’ main counteroffensive in Normandy, Operation Lüttich. 300 were killed or wounded. Nearby, in the town of Mortain, a cheerful former dairy farmer named Dominique Herbert has founded his own “Victory Museum,” displaying a remarkable number of objects from the war and creating dioramas with department store mannequins dressed up in vintage uniforms. Among his prized possessions are three genuine US World War II jeeps. His father and two of his friends shuttled us between the museum and the hilltop in them (I’ve just now coughed the last of the petrol fumes out of my lungs). The museum is very much worth a visit.

We also traveled to the landing beaches, of course, and to the American military cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, overlooking Omaha Beach, where the thousands of sober white marble crosses and stars of David stand as reminders of unutterable sacrifice. As in previous years, we left a wreath on the grave of First Lieutenant Jerry Schaefer, Princeton Class of 1940, who died on D-Day, probably when the glider carrying him crashed on landing (gliders turned out to be a bad way to transport airborne troops and were soon abandoned). Not far away is the German military cemetery at La Cambe, a very different sort of place. Instead of gravestones there are just stone plaques, topped at regular intervals by groups of five black stone crosses, and at the center a large mound with black stone statues of grieving women and a looming black cross. It is deliberately melancholy, expressing grief for the waste of war rather than pride for heroes. But it is difficult, walking amidst the plaques, not to notice that nearly half the Germans buried at La Cambe belonged to the SS. Among them is Sturmbahnführer Adolf Dieckmann, who, before being killed in Normandy, supervised the cold-blooded butchery of 190 men, 245 women and 207 children in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, soon after D-Day.

One of my favorite sites in Notmandy is the Pointe-du-Hoc, where Army Rangers heroically climbed steep cliffs under ferocious German fire on June 6 so they could disable artillery that the Germans, unbeknownst to them, had already removed. The nearby fields still bear the heavy marks of the air and artillery bombardments that preceded the landings. The first time I did the trip, it was late spring, and the craters were full of wildflowers, which spilled over the remains of the German bunkers like some sort of weird, beautiful installation art. This time the entire site was wreathed in thick fog, and we could barely see the waters of the English Channel below. The cliffs are collapsing, thanks mostly to natural erosion, although the hordes of tourists certainly don’t help. Go see the Pointe-du-Hoc before it disappears entirely.

Perhaps the most physically impressive site is in the town of Arromanches, where the allies constructed one of two massive artificial “Mulberry harbors” to ferry men, vehicles and supplies onto the beaches. You can still see several of the concrete blocks that the allies floated across the Channel from England to form jetties and piers (yes, concrete can float). In 1944, this one harbor, whose construction involved 600,000 tons of concrete, had 33 jetties and ten miles of roadways. During the ten months of its operation, well over 2 million men, nearly 500,000 vehicles, and 4 million tons of supplies entered Normandy through it. It was crucial to the war effort.

Each time I have seen Arromanches, I have wondered if contemporary governments are still capable of such extraordinary feats of planning, organization, and sheer industrial production. Living in New York City, where it takes decades of political conflict, endless bureaucracy, and billions of dollars to build a single new subway line, or to replace the aging and decrepit railway tunnel under the Hudson, it seems unlikely. Admittedly, we’re not exactly facing the same pressures that the allies faced in World War II. It still seems like something essential in our society has been lost.

And the record of the millions of young people who fought in Normandy provides an even sharper reminder of something else that has been lost. I don’t mean this as yet another lament for “the Greatest Generation,” a phrase which is pure if understandable guff. Yes, that generation rose to the challenge. But I can easily imagine the impressive Princeton cadets, veterans and other students whom I traveled with this week rising to the same challenges (and in a military that no longer practices the sort of discrimination it did during World War II). It goes without saying that I have been feeling a sharp sting of anxiety for the cadets, given the events of the last couple of weeks.

What has been lost, though, is what followed after the war, when the memory of shared sacrifice and commitment bound the country together in a way that has now almost entirely evaporated. Yes, the bonds of war coexisted with multiple forms of discrimination and exclusion, but they nonetheless had an enormously beneficial effect. It is harder to treat political opponents as treasonous scum when they have risked their lives for the country, and quite possibly bled for it. While many Americans hated John F. Kennedy with a passion, his military record made it harder to treat him as a pure enemy. And while a larger number hated Richard Nixon, his status as a veteran made it harder to think of him too as utterly outside the national community. But as the war falls below the horizon of living memory, and as the last veterans die, this common thread, already frayed, has broken altogether. A higher percentage of Americans served in uniform in World War II than in any other of the country’s wars—even, possibly, the Civil War (it depends on how you count). The country has not had anything like such a unifying experience since.

Of course this is not the only reason for our national polarization, but it’s a serious contributing factor. Could Donald Trump (he of the multiple Vietnam War draft deferments for “bone spurs”), have gotten away with the sort of insults he routinely hurls at political opponents if those men and women had served in war—and a large portion of the population had served with them?

The Trump administration also seems determined to sever even more connections between the military and certain portions of the American population. Defense Secretary Hegseth recently ended the program that allowed military officers to do graduate degrees at Ivy League universities, supposedly because professors like me were indoctrinating them with the woke mind virus. (I’ve known several of these officers, and they seemed pretty capable of resisting any such efforts). There have even been concerns that Hegseth might try to cancel programs like ROTC at the Ivies. Not only is this idea pretty ironic, given that many of these schools themselves banned ROTC for decades because of the military’s discriminatory policies against gay people—it’s also about the most counter-productive idea I could imagine. I hardly talked politics at all with the cadets this week, but they are the sort of future soldiers any Secretary of Defense should be deeply proud of. And by studying with them and befriending them, other students (and professors too!) get a much better sense of the military as an institution, and the sort of people who staff it.

But, of course, Trump and Hegseth have no desire whatsoever to bring the country back together in the way that the memory of World War II once brought it together. And that thought has left me with a bittersweet feeling as I fly back from France to the US—a return trip that far too many brave young Americans never made.