COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France — President Obama honored Friday a disappearing generation of American servicemen who rushed the shores of Normandy 70 years ago on D-Day in a daring and courageous act to liberate Europe, while promising a new generation of veterans that their sacrifices will never be forgotten.
“Here, we don’t just commemorate victory, as proud of that victory as we are; we don’t just honor sacrifice, as grateful as the world is; we come to remember why America and our allies gave so much for the survival of liberty at its moment of maximum peril,” Obama said at Omaha Beach’s American cemetery, where so many are buried. “And we come to tell the story of the men and women who did it, so that it remains seared into the memory of the future world.”
Recalling the stories of 90-year-old veterans who made it here to celebrate the day, Obama connected their sacrifices to another generation — “this 9/11 Generation of service members” — who “too chose to serve a cause that’s greater than self.”
And in telling the stories of the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, he pledged that, “future generations, whether 70 or 700 years hence, will gather at places like this to honor them — and to say that these were generations of men and women who proved once again that the United States of America is and will remain the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known.”
Under clear, sunny skies on the bluffs overlooking the shores of Omaha Beach, Obama addressed D-Day veterans, as well as veterans of other wars.
World leaders and dignitaries, including Queen Elizabeth II, President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Germany’s Angela Merkel, gathered in northern France to commemorate the world’s largest amphibious invasion, a turning point in World War II. More than 150,000 American, British, Canadian and other Allied D-Day troops risked — or lost — their lives to begin reclaiming Nazi-occupied Western Europe that day.
The leaders gathered as the crisis in eastern Ukraine, the worst conflict between Russia and the West since the Cold War, cast a long shadow. Obama was scheduled to attend a luncheon with the Russian president later Friday, although there were no plans for the two to meet directly.
The D-Day invasion changed the course of history. It cracked Hitler’s western front as Soviet troops made advances on the ground in the east. The naval invasion, the largest the world has ever seen, launched the week-long Battle of Normandy, which brought the Allies to Paris, which was then liberated from Nazi occupation.
Obama declared June 6 a national remembrance day.
Obama last came here five years ago as a young president who had inherited two wars but sought not only to end them, but inspire people across the world with a message of diplomacy and democracy.
He returned Friday as a second-term president burdened at home by polarizing controversies over his stewardship of America’s armed forces as he ends the war in Afghanistan, his decision to return suspected terrorists to the Taliban in order to free the last American prisoner of war, and his competence in making sure that today’s veterans receive the care they deserve.
Obama spoke Friday as a president who has learned that diplomacy and democracy neither work nor come as easy as he may have hoped, as a president burdened abroad by a rising tide of authoritarianism.
Obama’s remarks at Omaha Beach, after all, were the capstone to a week spent in Europe struggling to reassure the new democracies of Eastern Europe that he has their backs as they face a new foe in Russia, whose annexation of Crimea in March and actions to destabilize Ukraine he labeled earlier in the week a throw-back to the “the dark tactics of the 20th century.”
Daniela Deane contributed to this report from London.
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