Heroes we must never forget
THEY are the bravest of the brave from throughout Britain’s long history. Today we have one final chance to pay them tribute.
“Heroes” is an over-used term. But it could have been coined for these old soldiers — approaching 100 now or already there — who stormed the beaches of Northern France exactly eight decades ago to bring Hitler’s tyranny to an end.
Some were kids, teenagers with little or no life experience.
Yet they poured wide-eyed from their landing craft and charged into that blizzard of machine-gun fire — as friends and comrades fell stricken or dead around them — knowing with all certainty that their cause was just.
That the freedom of our great nation and the world depended on them.
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It is a privilege for those of us in the generations which followed, and who today enjoy the freedoms they won, to still be able to pay our respects in person.
And even now the immense sacrifice and achievement of the veterans of Operation Overlord has the power to overwhelm, as it did our King and Queen yesterday.
Freedom is not a given
It may be hard for us to fully comprehend the extent of Our Boys’ courage in the face of ultimate terror.
The unswerving sense of duty. The resilience, despite the horror, to prevail and then to triumph over the Nazi evil.
The incredible stoicism, too, of the families who grimly waved their lads off from England towards mortal danger and somehow still had to function while waiting for news.
Prince William’s tribute to them at the moving Portsmouth ceremony was well judged.
But, as his father the King said, it is vital we and generations to come never forget what they all accomplished — or that our freedom is NOT a given, that it must sometimes be fought for.
On the eve of that historic D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, Field Marshal Montgomery told the troops to strike a blow for liberty “which will live in history”.
“In the better days that lie ahead,” he said, “men will speak with pride of our doings.”
And we do.
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We should pray our young people never need to go to war in that way. Would today’s match those of 1944?
Many say not. We remain optimistic.
That those who recoil and sneer at the merest suggestion of national service are a minority.
That more would value our country — its democracy, its values and its freedom — as the greatest on the planet.
And fight to the end to preserve it like their great-grandfathers, to whom we all owe such a debt.
