The Philadelphia Inquirer du lieu suivant : Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • A6

A6 THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER FRIDAY, JUNE 7, 2019 INQUIRER.COM D-DAY INVASION I 75 YEARS LATER In Germany, defeat has evolved into liberation' By Kirsten Grieshaber and David Rising ASSOCIATED PRESS BERLIN When Chancellor Angela Merkel thanked the Allies for the D-Day invasion and the "liberation" of Germany in World War II, she might have raised some eyebrows internationally. To those at home, the statement was unremarkable. There's no denying that the machine guns and howitzers firing at the Allied forces landing in Normandy 75 years ago were manned by German soldiers. But over the decades, Germans' attitudes toward the war have evolved from a sense of defeat to something far more complex. While the leaders of France, Britain, the United States and Canada went to England to commemorate the troops' sacrifice and duty on Wednesday, Merkel listened quietly.

After the ceremony was over, she told reporters that she considered her invi military operation that eventually brought us in Germany the liberation from National Socialism," the Nazi political movement. She noted that the war's end brought Germany's rebirth as a leading European democracy, saying it was D-Day that set in motion the "reconciliation and unification of Europe, but also the entire postwar order that has brought us more than 70 years of peace." On Thursday, some German newspapers ran photographs of the ceremonies in Portsmouth, or black-and-white images from 1944 of U.S. soldiers reaching the shores of France. The top-selling Bild published a front-page picture of President Donald Trump, Queen Elizabeth II, Merkel and others looking upward, with an inset picture of a D-Day veteran re-creating his Normandy parachute jump with an American flag in tow. Its headline? "The world celebrates its liberators." tation "a gift of history." When those other leaders went to Normandy for ceremonies on D-Day itself on Thursday, Merkel was back in Berlin, holding a regular meeting with governors and discussing bilateral relations with the prime minister of Kosovo.

As the generation that elected Adolf Hitler and fought his geno-cidal war dies away, most Germans today see World War II through the prism of guilt, responsibility and atonement. And almost all agree that the defeat of the Nazis was a good thing. That hasn't always been the case. Many Germans who survived World War II had supported Hitler and the Nazi race ideology that led to the murder of six million Jews in Europe and they were devastated by the downfall of the Third Reich. "After 1945, Germans first referred to the end of World War II as said Johannes Tuchel, director of the German Resistance Memorial Center.

Their children, however, were faced with rebuilding the country from the ground up from the total defeat of the Nazis, and they saw potential rather than defeat. "In the 1950s, it became 'hour zero' a new beginning, Tuchel said. After the country was back on its economic feet, younger Germans started to question their elders, culminating in the "1968 movement" in which students confronted their parents with the atrocities committed during the Third Reich. Out of that era has grown today's complex attitude. "It has been a process to the point today where it is seen as Germany's liberation from the Nazis by the Allied forces," Tuchel said.

German leaders have largely followed the changing attitudes and in some cases led them. In 1985, then-West German President Richard von Weiz-saecker called the Nazi defeat Germany's "day of liberation" in a speech marking the 40th anniversary of the war's end. His words were supported by most Germans, and to this day it is often cited by politicians and taught in schools. Another key moment came in 2004, when then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder marked the 60th anniversary of Col. Claus von Stauffenberg's failed attempt to kill Hitler with a briefcase bomb.

Schroeder called von Stauffen-berg a hero erasing the Nazis' "traitor" label that had lingered after the war. Merkel, who at 64 is the first chancellor born after World War II, has taken the new German self-image even further. On Tuesday in Portsmouth, the embarkation point for the Allied force that invaded Nazi-occupied France in 1944, Merkel called D-Day a "unique, unprecedented French President Emmanuel Macron (left) applauds as President Donald Trump greets Russell Pickett, 94, who was wounded as he stormed Omaha Beach in the first wave on D-Day. alexbrandonap D-Day most anyone would do, he picked it from being destroyed." "He thumbed through it," she said. And inside he found the inscription, "Mr.

Mrs. J.S. Ho-back, Bedford, Va." The soldier, H.W Brayton, sent the Bible back to the Hobacks, with a letter, unaware that Raymond was lost. "You have by now received a letter from your son, saying he is well," Brayton wrote. "I sincerely hope so." In fact, on July 17, 1944, the Hobacks, who had seven children and a dairy farm outside town, received a telegram stating that Raymond was missing in action.

The day before they had received one stating that Bedford had been killed. "You can imagine what a shock it was to my parents, and then to us," Boggess, who was then 14, said. "My mother just cried and cried. Daddy went outside so people wouldn't see him cry. Both of them were just devastated." Bedford Hoback had been hit in the face by a shell fragment, according to historian Kershaw.

"His head dropped," recalled a buddy, Hal Baumgarten. "He was done for." Bedford Hoback is buried in the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, in Colleville-sur-Mer, not far from the beach. Boggess said her mother felt that the two brothers had gone off to war together, and they should rest near each other. As for the Bible, which Boggess now has, "Mother always treasured" it, she said. "She said next to her son she would like his Bible." The Hobacks weren't the only ones in the county getting the grim news, which took weeks to reach Bedford's telegraph office in the back of Green's drugstore, a long-vanished old hangout and today the site of a small museum.

"If you didn't have somebody that was affected by this, you knew somebody," Boggess said. "The whole community was just heartbroken and crying." Western Union operator Elizabeth Teass was the first to see the dreadful telegrams when they began to arrive from Roanoke on the teletype machine on July 17, Kershaw wrote. One came in, then another, and another. "I just sat and watched them and wondered how many more it was going to be," she remembered. She pasted the ticker tape messages onto Western Union stationery.

There were so many that she enlisted townspeople to help deliver them across the community. It was a sad task. "It just doesn't seem possible that it's been 75 years," Boggess said as she sat in the living room of her home with Raymond's Bible and the telegram her parents got about him. "You almost feel like it was Bedford Continued from Al Thursday were for those whose lives were cut off in their 30s, 20s and teens on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. An estimated 2,500 American and 1,900 British, Canadian and other soldiers and sailors were killed that day, as the Allies came ashore to begin the liberation of western Europe from Nazi Germany.

The men from this small town and county in south-central Virginia were at the American tip of the spear that was thrust at the Nazis that stormy morning: Roughly 220 soldiers in Company 116th Regiment, of the Army's 29th Division. About 35 of them were "Bedford Boys." Behind them would come more than 150,000 men and tons of equipment borne across the English Channel. And 11 bloody months ahead, would come the end of the war in Europe. But theirs was a costly honor. Company A lost 103 men on D-Day, 19 of them from Bedford County, according to the officials at the Memorial.

Another Bedford man was killed in Company F. Bedford men were cut down as they waded ashore holding their rifles overhead. They were shot on the beach. They drowned in the water. Others were maimed.

The dead littered the sand and their bodies rolled in the surf, according to historical accounts. In one incident, 29 Company A men were killed by massed enemy mortars and machine guns just as they hit the beach, according to historian Alex Kershaw. Five of them are believed to be Bedford men: Leslie Cecil "Dickie" Abbott Clifton Lee, Gordon Henry White, Nick Gillaspie, and Wallace Carter. "The slaughter was fast and merciless," Kershaw wrote in his 2003 book, The Bedford Boys. Friends and neighbors were killed.

One family the Hobacks lost two of its sons, Bedford, 30, and Raymond, 24. Raymond's body was never found. "What my mother always heard was that Raymond was wounded and left on the beach to be taken back to England to the hospital, and that the tide came in and washed him out into the channel," his sister, Lucille Boggess, 89, said Wednesday. "We don't know what all happened," she said. It was such chaos that day." But the day after the battle, a Bible that his mother, Macie, had given him for Christmas in 1938 was discovered by a fellow soldier.

"This soldier was walking on the beach, D-Day plus one," Boggess said. "He said he saw this Bible lying in the sand. And, as Continued from Al roes." Thursday's anniversary was marked with eloquent speeches, profound silences and passionate pleas for an end to bloodshed. French President Emmanuel Macron and President Donald Trump praised the soldiers, sailors and airmen who took part in the invasion, code-named Operation Overlord, saying it was the turning point that ended Nazi tyranny and ensured peace for Europe. "You are the pride of our nation, you are the glory of our A World War II veteran talks with a soldier at the end of a ceremony at the Bayeux War Cemetery in Normandy, franciscosecoap republic, and we thank you from the bottom of our heart," Trump said of the warriors who took part in what he called the ultimate fight of good against evil in World War II.

"They battled not for control and domination, but for liberty, democracy and self-rule," Trump said in a speech at the Normandy American Cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach, the bloodiest of five landing beaches. Macron saluted the courage, generosity, and strength of spirit that made them press on "to help men and women they didn't know, to liberate a land most hadn't seen before, for no other cause but freedom, democracy." He expressed France's debt to the United States for freeing his country from the Nazis. Macron awarded five American veterans with the Chevalier of Legion of Honor, France's highest award. "We know what we owe to you, veterans, our freedom," he said, switching from French to English. "On behalf of my nation I just want to say 'thank About 160,000 troops took part in D-Day, and many more fought in the ensuing Battle of Normandy.

Of those, 73,000 were from the United States, while 83,000 were from Britain and Canada. Troops started landing overnight from the air, then were joined by a massive force by sea on the beaches of Omaha, Utah, Juno, Sword and Gold, carried by 7,000 boats. "The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you," Gen. Dwight D.

Eisenhower had said in his order of the day. "The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to victory." On Wednesday, a commemoration was held in Portsmouth, England, the main embarkation point for the transport boats. Then the dignitaries came to the bluffs and beaches of Normandy, where veterans recalled what they saw 75 years ago. "The water was full of dead men, the beach had burning landing craft," said Jim Radford, 90, a British D-Day veteran from Hull, describing the scene near Gold Beach, where British landed. He was there again to watch the unveiling of a statue at Gold Beach, where a memorial to British fighters is to be erected.

At dawn Thursday, hundreds of civilians and military alike from around the world gathered on Omaha Beach. Dick Jansen, 60, from the Netherlands, drank Canadian whiskey from an enamel cup on the water's edge. Others scattered carnations into the waves. Randall Atanay, the son of a medic who tended to the dying and wounded, waded barefoot into the water, bonding with his dad, who has since died. Up to 12,000 people attended the ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery, with U.S.

veterans, their numbers diminishing as years pass, the guests of honor. A 21-gun salute thundered into the waters below the cemetery, on a bluff overlooking Omaha Beach, and across the rows of white crosses and Stars of David. The final resting places of more than 9,380 of the fallen stretched out before the guests. Britain's Prince Charles, his wife, Camilla, and Prime Minister Theresa May attended a remembrance service at the medieval cathedral in Bayeux, the first Normandy town liberated by Allied troops after D-Day. Hundreds of people packed the seaside square in the town of Arromanches to applaud veterans of the Battle of Normandy that ensued.

A wreath was placed outside the town's D-Day Museum. Gratitude was a powerful common theme. Macron thanked soldiers "so that France could become free again" at the Gold Beach ceremony with May and uniformed veterans laid the cornerstone of the memorial that will record the names of thousands of troops under British command who died in Normandy. "If one day can be said to have determined the fate of generations to come, in France, in Britain, in Europe and the world, that day was the 6th of June, 1944," May said. As the sun rose that morning, not one of the thousands of men arriving in Normandy "knew whether they would still be alive when the sun set once again," she said.

Passing on memories is especially urgent, with hundreds of World War II veterans now dying every day. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hailed those who "took a gamble the world had never seen before." Speaking at Juno Beach where 14,000 Canadians came ashore, Trudeau lauded the resulting world order including the United Nations and NATO that have helped preserve peace. But postwar tensions were evident. Not invited to the remembrance was Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had been present for the 70th commemoration of D-Day. Lucille Boggess, who lost two brothers on D-Day, holds Raymond's Bible, which was found by another soldier, michaele.

ruane Washington post.