'A Peaceabale Morning'

Boys of my age grew up fighting Nazis and Japs. We inherited our fathers’ war and were too old to “play Army” – always the phrase – by the time Vietnam heated up. A German refugee, Mrs. Becker, lived next door and we were ordered to kill only Japs if we were playing near her house. Most of our weapons and tactics were taken not from our fathers but from movies and television (Combat! and The Gallant Men). 

I remember only one “war story” told by my father from his four years (1942-46) in the Army Air Corps. He was severely sunburned while stationed in North Africa and made a hammock of a rubber sheet filled with olive oil to ease the burn. That’s it. He never spoke of combat, and I have no idea where he was on June 6, 1944. We understood that was terra nullius and never asked questions.

 

I read Howard Nemerov early, as part of that remarkable postwar generation of American poets who fought in World War II, including Karl Shapiro, Edgar Bowers and Anthony Hecht. After graduating from Harvard in 1941, Nemerov flew fifty combat missions with the Royal Canadian Air Force as a fighter pilot and another fifty-seven with the Eighth U.S. Army Air Force. He published “D-Day + All the Years,” first in The Sewanee Review in 1986 and collected it in War Stories the following year:

 

“What Daddy did on Opening Day? Yes, well,

 He led the squadron out before first light

 Over the Channel as far as Cap Gris Nez

 And turned to port along the Frisian shores

 Up past Den Helder and Terschelling where

 We had lost a few, and so on up as far

 As the Bight of Heligoland and distant Denmark

 Where Hamlet and the others used to live,

 And so wheeled homeward on a parallel track

 To land at Manston in Kent for an early lunch.

 

 “Pleasant and warm under the perspex canopy

 Of the office fifty feet above a sea

 Hammered and brazen as on the world’s first day,

 A peaceable morning. And the sky was blue.

 

 “And Daddy sitting there driving along

 Under his silly hat with the stiffener out,

 Wearing the leather gauntlets flared heroic

 Over the white silk elbow-length debutante’s gloves

 They used to wear then whatever the weather was,

 And more or less the way you see him now.”

 

The poem’s addressees are likely Nemerov’s three children, including art historian Alexander Nemerov. What’s not stated is at the heart of the poem. Nemerov describes the mission in some detail without overtly mentioning the Normandy invasion taking place nearby on that day: “A peaceable morning.” No heroics, no war stories.    

 

To put the Allies’ accomplishment on D-Day into historical context, here is Victor Davis Hanson writing in The Second World Wars (Basic Books, 2017):

 

“The D-Day invasion of Normandy (Operation Overlord) was the largest combined land and sea operation conducted since the invasion of Greece by King Xerxes of Persia in spring 480 BC. It dwarfed all of history’s star-crossed beach landings from Marathon to Gallipoli (April 1915). Normandy would serve as a model for large subsequent American seaborne operations from Iwo Jima (February 1945) and Okinawa (April 1945) to Inchon (September 1950). It made all prior iconic cross-Channel invasions in either direction—Caesar’s (55 BC), William the Conqueror’s (1066), Henry V’s (1415) or the British landing in Flanders—seem minor amphibious operations in comparison.”