Every time you think the regime of Donald Trump can stoop no lower, it manages to do something even more sordid to show contempt for America’s traditional allies and the global fight for democracy. On Friday his awful vice-president JD Vance, behaving like a far-right agitator, sought to fan flames of bigotry and division in our nation with a vile social media post in the wake of a disturbing murder. Then former Fox News pundit turned “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth tried to outbid his bosses the following day by defiling the annual D-Day commemorations with an attack on European migration policies in pursuit of their poisonous culture wars.
Hegseth is the most repulsive character in Trump’s terrible team, a strutting disaster of a defence secretary who helped lead the United States into a Middle East war, exposing their weakness to the world. He is, remember, so inept and out of his depth that he shared planned military strikes on a messaging app with a journalist. Now this pumped-up poseur, standing in a cemetery filled with the graves of fallen Second World War heroes, has dared use the Normandy gathering to attack “European capitals” for failing to stop “different European beaches” from being “stormed” by an “invasion” of migrants with “dangerous ideologies”. And he lectured “much of the West” for their supposed forgetfulness over freedom.
His aggressive and hostile words could not have been more out of place at such a sombre occasion. A tribute to surviving veterans, it marks the strength of an alliance between free nations and remembers the bravery of young men who risked lives to defeat fascism. Hegseth’s inappropriate verbal assault came amid a rather lame speech about “the greatest amphibious assault in human history” that took place 82 years ago, recalling “a frontal assault across the churning English Channel” into “beaches and cliffs fortified with iron, concrete and heavy artillery”.
He was right to hail the courage of troops throwing themselves against Nazi forces in what he called a suicidal mission. These men included my late father, who landed US soldiers and Sherman tanks amid the carnage on Omaha Beach, where Allied losses were heaviest on that longest day as they confronted heavily-fortified German positions on higher bluffs. After several months training in Essex, Wales and Scotland, he had joined a D-Day flotilla of about 6,500 vessels in Plymouth – then was ordered to take charge suddenly of LCT 1001 after its skipper fell sick. When he replied that he had never handled such a vessel in a beaching or harbour, his commander drily responded that it would be “an interesting experience” for him.
Thankfully, my father managed to pull off his landings – although other tanks sank and men drowned in their heavy equipment when launched too far out in choppy waters under heavy fire. In a lovely eight-page memo he wrote for my son and a cousin when they were studying the war at school – “a minuscule snapshot of a colossal operation” – he recalled being handed a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes before departure by the US army captain in charge of the troops he was taking. “Little did he know of my inexperience or he might not have been so cheerful.”
He went on to describe running “a ferry service” to and from Normandy after the bloodstained beach became the world’s busiest port. On one trip, he took black troops since the US military was segregated; on another, the first V1 Doodlebugs flew overhead. After 13 days, his craft was beached in a bad storm and battered by debris for two days, then had to be towed back for repairs. In his reflections, written six decades later, he remarks how Operation Overlord “was probably the greatest team effort in history” given all the nationalities participating – and “probably the last time we were on equal footing with the United States”.
It seems incredible that, like so many others, he played such a significant role when just 21 years old, having joined the navy as an ordinary seaman three years earlier. At the same age, I was a carefree student partying heavily in Aberdeen and – to my shame – took little interest when he went on about the war until older, although later thought about his exploits when reporting on conflicts. His service left him with huge admiration for Sir Winston Churchill, whom he met when the prime minister hosted a raucous dinner at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich. Although a Tory activist, chairing his local party, he loathed Brexit since it brought new fissures to our strife-torn continent.
For the same reason, his life shaped in so many ways by his war-time experiences, he would have been disgusted by Hegseth’s discordant words. He attended the 50th, 60th and 70th anniversary commemorations – and was thrilled to meet Barack Obama at Omaha in 2014. The president spoke beforehand with typical eloquence about the courage and sacrifice seen on those sands that he termed “democracy’s beachhead”, praising an alliance that ensured the “survival of liberty” and promising attending veterans their legacy was in good hands “in a time when it has never been more tempting to pursue narrow self-interest.”
Sadly, his pledge turned out to be false. Instead we see his venal successor focus on filling his family’s pockets while pandering to dictators, even forsaking Ukraine’s defence of freedom on our continent. At the 80th anniversary event in 2024, there was a deeply moving moment when an American veteran in a wheelchair embraced President Volodymyr Zelensky to hail his heroism.
Now we witness Trump’s ethno-nationalist acolytes such as Hegseth and Vance inflaming some of the darkest forces in society and shredding alliances built in the aftermath of Second World War victory. These people preach about liberty as they assail allies and ignore the lessons of history that saw a generation of men such as my father put their lives on the line to turn the tide on fascism on those beaches.
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