The Valley remembers D-Day
Image from The Longest Day (1962).
This week marks the 81st anniversary of the D-Day invasion, when the armada of the Allies crossed the English Channel and began the bloody, brutal, march from Normandy to Berlin. And on the Home Front, change swept through the Bay Area and Santa Clara Valley. We pause and remember—with History San Jose and the Marin Independent Journal.
From History San Jose's "Home Front" exhibit (2008–9)
Young men and women left their families and hometowns, many for the first time, to serve in far off places like Monte Cassino, Tarawa, Normandy, and Okinawa. At home, people were constantly reminded of the war through newspapers, radio, correspondence, work, and entertainment. To support the war effort, essential goods like tires, gas, sugar, coffee, canned goods, and metal were rationed. The public was encouraged to work for victory, purchase war bonds, and grow Victory Gardens.
During this time of patriotism, those at home experienced unprecedented change. Uncontrolled fear led to the internment of Santa Clara Valley’s Japanese population, yet women and other minorities were given opportunities to work in positions formerly unavailable to them. Local industry adapted to support the war effort by increasing canning production and manufacturing machinery and other equipment to be sent overseas. Entrepreneurs in the evolving technology industry supplied much needed communication devices to the war effort. By the end of the War, the Valley’s economy was no longer solely dependent on the fruit industry. Manufacturing and technology that were developed during the war continued to grow into today’s Silicon Valley.
Read the whole thing here.
From Sarah Nagle's Marin Voices column in the Marin Independent Journal: “Lessons of D-Day Continue to Resonate”
Most of D-Day's survivors have already left us. Some died on bloody beaches 81 years ago. Some survived the war, survived the ’40s, the ’50s, the ’60s and the 20th century.
My grandfather’s boyhood best friend died somewhere between Omaha Beach and the Battle of the Bulge. My grandfather, by contrast, lived well into his 80s.
Today, dignitaries are making speeches, and some of the last survivors are paying their respects to their fallen brothers.
Eighty years is a lifetime, if you are lucky.
The teenagers who landed on Omaha Beach were survivors of the Depression. They’d grown up in a world that seemed to be falling apart. If you were 20 in 1944, you grew up in the midst of the greatest economic crisis of the 20th century, you grew up in a world with political storm clouds gathering and, somehow, you ended up being labeled the “greatest generation.”
I never knew my grandfather’s long-dead best friend. He was a photo in an album – a beautiful young man hanging out on the beaches of New York in the last years of the Depression, pulling stunts to impress the girls.
We never know our fates. We usually don’t understand our future until it is past. But, in the late 1930s, some “experts” thought the western world’s best years were past. Kids growing up in the Depression weren’t supposed to expect much. Just having steady work was an accomplishment.
The Allies changed the future at Omaha Beach. For some, it meant there would be no future. When I look at my grandparents’ old album, I see young men who thought they’d be friends forever. I see kids scraping by and having a good time in the Depression. I see a man whose life took a different turn on a different bloody beach a few years later. And I see another man who lived until he was nearly 90. I see America. Maybe that is why dignitaries visit graveyards in France, Italy, Luxembourg and elsewhere. Because America is there.
In 1938, those bright young men on the New York beach didn’t know what the future held. Neither did all those men on landing crafts in June of ’44.
If you are lucky enough to still have a survivor of the war in your life, take this opportunity to ask about it, and the lives that went before and after.
History is like an unmapped river. We’ll never know if the roughest water is behind or ahead.
Read the whole thing here.
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