Day at the Beach

...Overlord as a crusade to annihilate the evil of Nazism, but in a more personal sense...

...At the next Battle of Omaha, where will we find the Sgt...

...Only desperate human endeavor can prevail in the end...

...Since when," she muttered with undisguised contempt, "does the President come before a vet...

...Ruthless human action is required in battle...

...The French troops, said Reynaud, "were worn out through lack of sleep and shattered by the action of enemy bombers...

...As luck had it, the high winds and strong currents made a mess of carefully laid plans to match up each regiment with the particular sector where it had been rehearsed to perble obstacle to the men and especially the tanks and vehicles that made it ashore...

...The enemy must be annihilated before he reaches our main battlefield...

...But that did not happen...

...They had lost 400,000 men and most of their dreaded Panzer Divisions...

...He found it difficult to stay on his feet—like most infantrymen, he was badly overloaded, soaking wet, exhausted, trying to struggle through wet sand and avoid the obstacles with mines attached to them...

...The The American Spectator August 1994 33 official history of the 16th Regiment—the first to hit the beach that morning—drily states: Range cards found in defensive positions contained evidence of detailed preparations for invasion...

...V Corps' plan for Omaha eschewed tactical subtleties . . . and any attempt to seize the five vital beach exits by manoeuvre...

...zeroed in on the beaches was the culmination of...

...Whatever happened was now out of the hands of General eight yards separated the crowd of men and the sea...

...Except for Stalingrad, the Battle of Normandy—Overlord—was the 32 The American Spectator August 1994 most decisive of the war in Europe...

...To the Germans looking down over the beach from the western fortifications built into the cliffs at Raz de la Percee, it looked as though the defenders had achieved Rommel's objective of stopping the invasion at the water's 1From D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, by Stephen E. Ambrose...

...I shot at it but there was no way I was going to knock out a German concrete emplacement with a 30-caliber rifle...

...You wouldn't know it isn't standard Army until you see the scruffy looking French kids and their pretty girl friends driving in them...

...By September 4, the Allies were at the Belgian-German border...

...However, one avenue of escape from the beach was now open, perilous though it was...

...His pack was hit twice, and the chin strap on his helmet was severed by a bullet...

...We must stop him in the water...

...They included eight reinforced concrete bunkers, almost impervious to bombardment from the sea...

...It became evident rather quickly that we weren't going to accomplish much...

...However, following a barrage of hand grenades, the [men] closed with the enemy, destroyed many of them and captured an officer and 20 Germans...

...Individual men—a succession of individual men, on their own, or leading small groups of ten or twenty, not under orders or according to some master plan, but out of a sense of desperation, or responsibility to their comrades, or honor, or pride, or all of them mixed together—began driving vital wedges into the German defenses all along the Omaha front...

...Simon &Schuster, 655 pages, $30...

...When they gained the summit, they sent word to a company of the 116th Infantry below to follow them up, and a handful of men did so...

...Among the thousands of men crouched on that beach in the early morning of D-Day a serious paralysis had set in...

...The landing craft were carried to sections of the beach that were totally unfamiliar to the men—disorienting and confusing them in the gray breaking light of dawn...

...1 By 8 a.m., it was clear that a catastrophe was unfolding...

...If the Allies had had any other choice they certainly would not have selected Omaha as a landing site...

...Spauldings to lead us off the beach...

...I saw some tracers coming from a concrete emplacement which, to me, looked mammoth...

...The first several assault waves had been decimated, and almost all of the tanks and artillery pieces had been lost...

...To make matters worse, there was no cover or place of concealment for several hundred yards from the low-water line where the men landed to the sea wall at the top of the beach...

...This was the situation everywhere along Omaha that morning, especially among the men who had never been in combat before...

...Valance was hit again, in the left thigh by a bullet that broke his hipbone...

...The first assault waves onto the beach at H hour (6:30 a.m...

...Omaha Beach T he weather, the weather—leaden, low-lying nimbus clouds, with sharp, cold winds whipping in from the channel, and periods of slashing rain—dominates the preparations for the main events of D-Day as it dominated the main event fifty years ago...

...The several thousand servicemen and -women who participated and helped support the events of the commemoration are smart-looking, respectful, and infinitely polite—sirring and mamming you at every encounter...

...Most of the men on Omaha on D-Day didn't have what it took...

...As the first landing craft dropped their ramps just short of the beach and the Americans loaded down with 75 or 100 pounds of equipment began to jump into the surf, the Germans opened fire from every position along Omaha, their machine guns raking back and forth across the waterline...

...Then with a wisdom beyond his years and a smile he couldn't quite hide, he added, "Except they keep movin' the Vets further and further back...

...It's as if the gods of war want to remind and reproach the light-hearted here—the French, mostly, and the young—of what it was like then, when three thousand Americans fell on this beach...

...And most of them know that, although they will never be back to this place, they have never been away from it...

...A young marine had just asked her husband—one of the first to land on Utah Beach—to move away from where he was taking a picture...

...To make Paris "a city of ruins," replied Marshal Main, "will not affect the issue...

...And the heavy but fragile mobile radios, the only link to the high command out at sea, were either lost in the surf or damaged and inoperable...

...they are taught also to disavow their natural discomfort about homosexuality, and to disavow the importance of the so-called "manly virtues" as childish or adolescent or declasse, or reactionary, or mindless—notions like courage, honor, duty, loyalty, comradeship...

...This was an act of hubris...

...Beginning in school, and perhaps earlier, little boys and young men are nowadays taught that they must be sensitive, compassionate, not-too-competitive, not-tooaggressive, not-too-ambitious or lustful for power, nottoo-sexually-assertive...

...Since the end of World War II we have fought a number of large and small wars, and in all of them in which we were opposed by a well-trained, resourceful, and determined enemy—whether the North Koreans and Chinese, the North Vietnamese, or the Somalians—we may have endured but we did not prevail...

...John Spaulding leading a remnant of 'E Company up the slope to attack the strong point guarding the western side of the beach exit—four concrete shelters, two pillboxes, five machine guns...

...ments, about thirteen or fourteen thousand men altogether, made up the assault force for Omaha Beach, four miles from end to end...

...In the final analysis, the French nation, the French culture, the French people were not able to come up with that critical mass...

...For about three dollars you can buy one of the "authentique" crickets that the American paratroopers used to identify each other in the darkness of early 36 The American Spectator August 1994 morning...

...In fact, although it was not recognized at the time, the defeat of the Germans in Normandy, six weeks after D-Day, broke the back of the Wehrmacht...

...Among the tired, wet, scared groups of men huddled behind the sea wall waiting to be bombarded to death piecemeal by the enemies' mortars and artillery, a small number of leaders—officers, noncoms, and privates—began to emerge, and by example, exhortation, and bullying began to move the men up that slope, strewn with barbed wire and sown with mines, inch by inch...

...Their field of fire...

...Two or three miles inland a highly experienced artillery regiment had established a defensive position...

...At this, a British eye-witness noted, "the French perceptibly froze...

...38 The American Spectator August 1994...

...Plans won't do it...

...F or the twelve thousand surviving troops, virtually cut off from each other and their sources of information and supplies, and facing a combat-hardened enemy twice as strong as expected, without supporting tanks or artillery, disorganized and demoralized—their fate and the fate of Omaha Beach was now in their own hands...

...One of the unintended consequences has been to remove war as one of the two major instruments of foreign policy...

...I never anticipated any gun emplacements being that big...

...Then with a wisdom beyond his years and a smile he couldn't quite hide, he added, "Except they keep movin' the Vets further and further back...

...That is only human and understandable...

...A great city, he said, if stubbornly defended, "absorbed immense armies...

...There were thirty-five pillboxes with various types of artillery and automatic weapons, six mortar pits, thirty-five rocket-launching sites, and eighty-five machine gun nests...

...I abandoned my equipment, which was dragging me down into the water...

...On the eastern flank of the beachhead, the men of the 16th Regiment of the 1st Division were pinned down by the strong defenses in front of one of the main exits from the beach—one of the tactical objectives of the Regiment...

...In this state they stumbled forward into a torrent of fire, seeking whatever shelter they could find among the mined beach obstacles, or falling down and playing dead on the exposed beach...

...The 352nd, unlike most German divisions in France, was made up of three grenadier regiments of tough, skilled, disciplined veterans of the Russian front...

...The men who had not been killed outright or seriously wounded huddled terrified and demoralized in the lee of the sea wall as the tide rolled in behind them...

...Allied and Hollywood propaganda notwithstanding, military historians today acknowledge that the German army was the outstanding fighting force of the Second World War and that it could be defeated only against overwhelmingly favorable conditions...

...Half of this unit was manned by poorly trained Polish and Russian conscripts and inexperienced teenaged troops...

...Every instinct told them to stay put and keep under cover...

...The 47-minute naval bombardment that had preceded the first assault waves was also largely ineffective...

...The 116th was new to combat, and having mislanded in front of a very heavily defended section of the beach, it lost most of its officers and so had become confused and dangerously demoralized...

...Spiritual, not in the large sense in which Eisenhower thought of Operation Yale Kramer is clinical professor of psychiatry at The Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey...

...The entire beach was subject to sweeping artillery fire from these points...

...By mid-morning Bradley "gained the impression that our forces had suffered an irreversible catastrophe...

...Looking up from the waterline on the windswept beach it is easy to see that this was not a good place for an amphibious assault...

...And, naturally, defenses were strongest at points closest to form a specific tactical mission...

...The veteran asked him why and the marine replied, "I'm sorry, Sir, but the President will be coming by here...

...Attacking blind through a heavy overcast, the Liberator bombers, in their anxiety to avoid bombing onto the approaching assault troops, had dropped hundreds of tons of high explosive onto the fields behind the formidable beach defenses...

...The official history of the 16th Regiment describes what Lt...

...This was the view that the Allied generals had in WWII—the model that said substitute steel for flesh whenever possible...

...When Bradley heard, late in the morning, that the beaches were being defended by the 716th and the 352nd, he was stunned...

...At both ends of the beach there is high ground with commanding views of the entire curving anchorage...

...The small force was eventually successful in wiping out this strong point and went on to attack the eastern strongpoint guarding the exit...

...It's good...

...In war as in life there has to be a critical mass of men with initiative and determination before things can happen...

...Some clever entrepreneur has cornered the market on surplus U.S...

...The planned support for the men—armored vehicles, tanks, and heavy artillery to take out the strong points—had, in the- meantime, were formidable, the odds seemed good for the thirteen thousand men who were to make up the first several assault waves...

...were to be made by two regiments of the proud First Infantry Division—the "Big Red One," a rare American division with significant combat experience—and two regiments from the less experienced Twenty-Ninth Division...

...It is difficult to keep such stern notions in mind amidst the festivities of this weekend...

...They remained twelve miles out to sea, waiting for reports to come in...

...And this seems to cut across all classes, except, perhaps the new immigrant class...

...I remember floundering in the water with my hand up in the air, trying to get my balance, when I was first shot through the palm of my hand, then through the knuckle...

...Although briefer than those great struggles—it lasted only eight or nine hours—it too was one of those in which two armies of men clash, each knowing from the outset that there can be no retreat, that only their wills can determine the outcome...

...If that had happened, and Rommel had been able to push the Americans back into the sea, he might have rolled up the entire invasion by splitting the isolated American army at Utah Beach from the British Second Army and strangling them each separately...

...By mid-afternoon the Americans had overrun even the strongest of the German positions on Omaha...

...Max Hastings, one of the leading historians of Overlord, states: There is no more demanding task for infantry than to press home an attack across open ground under heavy fire, amid heavy casualties...

...They were the breadwinners and the protectors of women and children against external threats and dangers...

...When these are absent or minimal, as they were that morning, the fighting man must depend on his own personal motivations—his sense of honor, of duty, of loyalty to his comrades—and the leadership of those around him...

...Every young Frenchman in Normandy and his girlfriend seem to be masquerading this weekend as GIs-1944 style helmets, leggings—the works...

...Radical individualism, narcissism, multiculturalism, tribalism, separatism—all suggest a centrifugal force at work that seems to ask whether there is anything in America worth fighting for...

...There are stands that sell 50th Anniversary T-shirts for ten or twenty dollars, and other stands that sell those wonderfully smelling grilled spicy sausages—merguez—covered with browned onions on a toasted bun...

...In the short time left before the great offensive starts," Rommel wrote to his commanders that spring, "we must succeed in bringing all defenses to such a standard that they will hold up against the strongest attacks...

...Sooner or later, men had to close with men, disarm them or kill them and occupy the ground they held...

...Most of the men landing on Omaha did not realize that they were outclassed as an army...

...The notion of personal loyalty, to say nothing of national loyalty, brings forth sniggers from cultural sophisticates, resulting in a kind of reverse jingoism...

...These four regiThe relatively brief battle of Omaha Beach, significantly more critical than the fighting that went on at the other four assault beaches, foreshadowed the titanic struggle for the rest of Normandy...

...Thomas Valance survived, barely...

...The men were virtually leaderless because many of their officers had been killed on arrival or had become separated from their boat sections...

...And what was left—a football field away—was given to those our president had come to honor and thank so movingly...

...It is hard to imagine the French fighting desperately for anything—even France...

...The signs all over the region remind you that the close relationship between patriotism and profit has not been suspended for D-Day...

...This move was routinely reported to Allied Intelligence by the French Resistance via the usual method: carrier pigeon...

...That is until General Norman Cota arrived at the western end of the beach and began prodding and rousing his men, leading from the front—a posture he was famous for and exposing himself to enemy fire...

...At that moment you could hear a little gasp of indignation from the handsome lady...

...The spirit that came from every man that day, alive, wounded, dying, or dead—from every dog-face, every noncom, every ninety-day wonder, every field officer...

...They were surprised to find that that formula did not work...

...Is there one for the enlisted men...

...W e have a tendency to think that our postmodern wars can be won with machines operated by technicians at a computer console—no flesh and bone at stake...

...But that wasn't the worst of it...

...Rommel's defenses were among the most powerful encountered by Americans in the entire war...

...I suppose it was best summed up by a handsome elderly lady from Seattle...

...It was this small path which for forty-eight hours was the main personnel exit of the entire V Corps...

...From 6,000 yards offshore it was difficult to fire accurately through the mist, dust, and smoke...

...One was a paved road, the other four mere cart-tracks barely six feet wide...

...One problem was we didn't quite know what to fire at...

...The bodies of my buddies were washing ashore and I was the one live body in amongst so many of my friends, all of whom were dead, in many cases very severely blown to pieces...

...Individual units had not only been landed far from where they were supposed to but had dispersed all over the beach...

...out of the hands of General Gerow, commander of the forces on Omaha Beach, the Fifth Corps, and his two divisional commanders General Huebner, of the First Division, and General Gerhardt, of the Twenty-ninth...

...And that's what made the crucial difference...

...He crawled up the beach "and staggered up against the seawall and sort of collapsed there and, as a matter of fact, spent the whole day in that same position...

...This slope, now overgrown with a tangle of wild vegetation, was covered with mines and barbed wire, and completely exposed to raking machine gun fire from pillboxes...

...The historian Martin Gilbert reminds us that on June 11, 1940, Churchill flew across the channel to Briare on the Loire, where the French Government had relocated, in a last minute effort to stiffen French resolve: Churchill urged the French to make Paris a fortress, to fight in every street...

...Spaulding and his band of men did: At first this particular strong point was practically impossible to destroy, for, in addition to the extremely stubborn resistance encountered, the strong point with its maze of underground shelter trenches and dugouts was virtually "untouchable...

...But the marine had moved on to another old soldier...

...he way a nation fights its wars tells us something T about its culture as well as its politics, economics, and technology...

...Each one of their stories is a mixture of loss, fear, pride, and, often, humor...

...He devised an awesome scheme—a wall made up of concrete, steel, guns, and three hundred thousand men—to fulfill his vow and made it come true, using round-the-clock slave labor...

...The further you get away from the beaches the more it seems like a circus-come-totown atmosphere...

...It's good...

...Disciplined training and experience are The American Spectator August 1994 35 enormously helpful to the combat soldier in overcoming his terror in battle...

...These were the men who had made the plans but they did not have to carry them out...

...Geography and Erwin Rommel were destiny for those men on Omaha that day...

...The beach was so narrow in places that only seven oredge...

...By the time they reached the beaches, most had thrown up their breakfasts and were numb from crouching in the cramped and crowded landing craft during the three-hour trip to shore...

...The changes that have occurred in the culture in the last two or three decades have had some good, some bad, and some unintended consequences...

...imes have changed in the last fifty years...

...Essentially my part in the invasion had ended by having been wiped out as most of my company was...

...It took some of them thirty or forty minutes to inch themselves across the exposed beach to the sea wall at the head of the beach that provided some small degree of protection from the machine gun fire but not from the mortar fire...

...On Omaha Beach Rommel almost succeeded...

...The procedure was to dispatch each message twice, just in case German soldiers armed with shotguns killed one of the birds...

...By June 1944, Rommel, who had taken over the defense of the Western front, realized that the only hope of stopping an Allied invasion was at the water's edge...

...The Americans were expecting no more than 1,000 troops to be manning the defenses at Omaha and, although their fire-power and defensive installations T he first elements of the 16th and 116th Regiments coming ashore faced by far the greatest concentration of German fire on the entire invasion front...

...Instead, [Omaha commander] General Gerow committed his men to hurling themselves frontally against the most strongly defended areas in the assault zone...

...It was Sgt...

...The enemy even had information detailing differences between an LST [Landing Ship/Tank] -5 and an LST-6...

...The battle that raged on this narrow strip of sand and pebbles—barely ten yards wide at high tide—was one of the most terrible of the American war...

...n a sense, the relatively brief battle of Omaha Beach, significantly more critical than the fighting that went on at the other four assault beaches, foreshadowed the titanic struggle for the rest of Normandy...

...Omar Bradley, the respected field general who that day was responsible for the American assault forces, had been told by his intelligence people that the German defenders of Omaha comprised units of the 716th Infantry Division, a defensive outfit, unequipped to counterattack, and low in morale...

...As we came down the ramp, we were in water about knee-high and started to do what we were trained to do, that is, move forward and then crouch and fire...

...Many soldiers were even dropped off prematurely into water over their heads by naval personnel anxious to beat a hasty retreat from the German artillery...

...Though we could see it dimly through the haze and hear the echo of its guns, the battle belonged that morning to the thin, wet line of khaki that dragged itself ashore on the Channel coast of France...

...This time the pigeon hunters got both birds...

...You wonder whether, back in 1940, the signs didn't say "Welcome to Our Captors—Wine and Cheese Our Speciality...

...Aboard the, cruiser Augusta, General Bradley watched the disaster unfold...

...There are signs that announce "Senior Golf" at the Omaha Beach Golf Course, and signs that say "Welcome to Our Liberators—Wine and Cheese Our Speciality...

...This kind of role requires a certain amount of preparation and "training" that each culture provides in its own way, to fit the challenges and dangers that its menfolk are likely to face...

...The rest of the coast was made up of rocky reefs and sheer cliffs...

...At all of the formal events including the main one at the American Cemetery at which Clinton spoke—except for a handful of selected Vets used for media purposes to be available for presidential handshakes—the best seats were assigned to the Big Fish and their wives...

...I think they've got their priorities a little mixed up...

...By then he had barricaded the shoreline from Cherbourg to Calais with half a million assorted anti-invasion obstacles and more than four million mines...

...Fifty years ago men were less doubtful than they are today about their role in the culture...

...Explosives won't do it...

...Its soldiers and officers had had far more disciplined training for war than ours—and five more years of experience...

...The naval shelling did no more than the bombing to reduce the fighting power of the defenses that had been constructed to be almost immune from direct fire from the sea...

...By the end of 1941 Hitler controlled the entire western coast of Europe from Norway to Spain, and he had decided "to make this front impregnable against every enemy...

...We need not be reminded of the many manifestations of the withering of the legitimate authority that is crucial in holding any civilization together—law, morals, religion, and their respective representatives...

...Left with diplomacy, and a little inefficient economic bullying which often hurts our economy as much or more as our enemies, we are correctly perceived as a great muscle-bound giant who can win contests of muscle size but who can't move...

...You can sense this when you talk to the old men who were here then...

...Some men did, and were able to get enough of the others to follow...

...Nor did Bradley know that the Germans manning the defenses along Omaha had escaped almost unscathed from the air and naval bombardment that preceded H-Hour...

...Jeeps with all the standard Army insignia and is renting them...

...Today, there are very strong forces at work reshaping men's role in their relationship to women and society...

...Philip Streczyk of Company E who charged across the mine field and, using a bangalore torpedo, made the first breach in the enemy wire...

...We are talking about matters of degree and quantity...

...And indeed they radioed this news to Army Group B, Rommel's headquarters...

...To make matters worse, there were only five exits along the entire length of beach—all of them heavily fortified...

...There are huge crowds in many town squares milling around, waving little American flags and shouting and cheering every bus that passes whether it contains old Vets or not...

...It was true...

...Streczyks and Lt...

...These emplacements held high-velocity guns 75mm or larger—large enough to destroy a tank or wreak havoc on a landing craft...

...Almost immediately he was followed by Lt...

...As they wander through the quiet symmetrical beauty of the American Cemetery on this cold and rainy day, passing the many crosses that say "Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God," searching for a lost friend, or perhaps something of themselves from fifty years ago...

...But it was the only workable link between Utah (which wasn't as heavily fortified or adversely laid out) and the British assault beaches to the east...

...After Normandy there was no chance whatever for the Germans to win or stalemate the war...

...Bradley, commander of all of the American Forces on D Day...

...There were 15,000 reinforced concrete defense posts, many of them designed by Hitler himself...

...There is nothing right in America, nothing good about America...

...It is hard to imagine the French undertaking a cross-channel invasion to rescue the English if the shoe had been on the other foot and the Nazis had occupied Great Britain...

...Of the 183 men who had landed, 100 were dead, wounded or missing in action...

...It ranks with Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, and Tarawa in ferocity and bloodiness...

...One corporal, asked what he thought about what was going on, answered drily, "Good...

...One corporal, asked what he thought about what was going on, answered drily, "Good...

...It was clear that events had overtaken the elaborate plans to capture Omaha...

...It was told that a great many tanks and vehicles could be seen burning and destroyed, and hundreds of wounded and dead could be seen lying on the sand...

...He later wrote, As the morning lengthened, my worries deepened over the alarming and fragmentary reports we picked up on the navy net...

...It took only about a month to force the French to surrender after the Germans invaded...

...From those messages we could piece together only an incoherent account of sinkings, swampings, heavy enemy fire and chaos on the beaches...

...infinite painstaking to insure infliction of the greatest possible damage on an invading force...

...It was individuals, not divisions, who determined the outcome that day...

...Among the tired, wet, scared groups of men huddled behind the sea wall waiting to be bombarded to death piecemeal by the enemies' mortars and artillery, a small number of leaders began to emerge...

...foundered in ten-knot winds and in four-to-eight-foot seas that left the men soaking wet and severely seasick...

...from their fear, their desperation, their grit—was what eventually won this four-mile strip of beach...

...The sea wall, twelve feet high in places, provided some cover to those in its immediate shadow, but it and the dense barbed wire all over it provided a formidaEngland—the Pas de Calais and the area from Le Havre to the Netherlands...

...Is it conceivable today that an American Army of citizen soldiers could muster the required ruthlessness, will, or whatever it is that it takes to confront a determined, even fanatic enemy...

...At that time he seriously considered stopping the landings on Omaha and diverting the follow-up waves to Utah...

...He took two additional flesh wounds...

...The French had decided that life itself and the French way of life in particular was dearer to them than freedom...

...Stephen Ambrose, the latest historian of the cross-channel invasion, has collected a large number of eye-witness accounts, one of which conveys the horror of the experience: Sgt...

...34 The American Spectator August 1994 The tide was coming in, rapidly, and the men around Valance were getting hit...

...For the men who fought that day, the Battle of Omaha Beach became a spiritual struggle and perhaps that is why we accord it a special place in our memory...

...What the Americans did not know was that weeks earlier Rommel had ordered the 352nd Infantry Division into the area...

...It was the last great struggle of the Germans in the West...

...They were men like Staff Sergeant William Courtney and Private First Class William Braher of A Company's Fifth Ranger Battalion, who were probably the first Americans to reach the top of the cliff on the extreme western flank, around 8:30 a.m...

...Those attackers who breached the sea wall found themselves on a shelf of grassy sand and marsh that sloped up sharply to a plateau 150 feet above the beach...

...Our attitudes about men, masculinity, national loyalty, war, and legitimate authority have all changed markedly...

...It reminds you of that great old Bill Mauldin cartoon of 1944—the one in which two officers are looking at a mountain sunset and one The American Spectator August 1994 37 says to the other, "Beautiful view...

...A week later France surrendered...

...They seem to be the only source of authenticity and perspective in the sea of media and officialdom that has overtaken the commemorations...