Could today’s generation meet the challenge of D-Day? Stephen Jardine

Sometimes a moment in life hits you hard in the stomach.

Twenty years ago I was in Normandy reporting on the 60th anniversary of D-Day.

We’d followed in the footsteps of the British troops who’d landed on some of the most fortified beaches in the world, beat back the defending Germans and advanced under heavy fire to liberate Europe.

On a sweltering hot June afternoon we were with a group of elderly Scots veterans who had gathered at a memorial in a village where many of their comrades had died in an ambush of bombs and bullets.

Standing stiff to attention in medals, ties and blazers, they were waiting in the stifling sunshine to be inspected by a British dignitary but his lunch was running late so the old soldiers had to wait…and wait.

I was next to the local Mayor who eventually snapped. She marched off into the village and returned minutes later wearing her Tricolor sash and followed by some children from the local primary school. It was they who walked along the line of veterans shaking hands and thanking them for the freedom that was won at such cost. Then they sang the MarseilIaise and the rest is a bit teary.

This week that sacrifice has been commemorated again on the 80th anniversary, perhaps the last where any veterans will be present. On June 6, 1944, almost 160,000 soldiers from across Britain and other Allied nations landed on the Normandy coastline to help liberate Western Europe. By that stage of the war the vast majority of soldiers were conscripts, ordinary individuals plucked from civilian life, given basic training and a rifle and sent to fight for freedom. Amongst them, a bricklayer from Edinburgh and a lorry driver from Dumfries.

Films like Saving Private Ryan give a sense of the hell they went through but only they could ever really know. We can just wonder about how deep they had to delve simply to survive.

My grandfather fought on the Western Front in the First World War and my father served in the Pacific towards the end of the Second World War. Could I do what they had to do?

At the signing of the historic treaty to end the Cold War in 1997, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair said “Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war. That is a prize beyond value”.

But it’s a prize that comes with responsibility. We’ve gone from being a generation capable of storming the D-Day beaches to one that requires the option of extra hot drinks in coffee shops. During one interview with a veteran this week, the presenter offered a trigger warning in advance of his graphic tale.

All that can only happen in a society safe and comfortable enough to contemplate things far beyond basic survival and we owe that to the generations like the D-Day veterans who made sacrifices we can’t even imagine.

The last people to fetishize war are those who actually fought. They know the human cost and the far reaching consequences of conflict. But as the number of those left dwindles, responsibility for remembering shifts to us. Let’s hope we are up to the job.