On 80th anniversary of D-Day, Sonoma County veterans reflect on supreme courage, sacrifice

Some find it ironic that America will be celebrating the Allies signal triumph over fascism and authoritarianism at a time when those forces are more prevalent in the U.S. and on the world stage

June 06, 2024

Eighty years ago on Thursday, some 150,000 troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and other Allied nations fought the climactic battle of World War II, landing on the beaches of Normandy, France and punching through Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall,” at frightful cost.

Twenty years ago Thursday, on the 60th anniversary of D-Day, Izaak Schwaiger landed in Iraq along with the rest of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit. A military translator, he was stationed in Najaf, a Shia holy city 100 miles south of Baghdad, where he came under frequent fire from the Islamist Mahdi Army.

“When we landed in Iraq on June 6, the date wasn’t lost on anybody,” recalled Schwaiger, now a civil rights attorney based in Sebastopol. “It was like, ‘Here we go! We’re ready to do this job.’”

There were some similarities to the circumstances faced by their World War II forebears, “but more dissimilarities,” he said. “We weren’t wading into a hail of machine-gun fire, watching people get torn apart by the hundreds.”

Allied casualties were estimated at 10,000 that day with 4,414 confirmed dead. Less than 11 months later, Berlin fell.

Yes, Operation Overlord was “a huge tactical and strategic victory,” Schwaiger mused. What he finds more inspiring about those battles was the courage and sense of duty in the breast of each man who went a shore that day, “knowing it was even odds, whether they would live or die.

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“Sleepwalking” into a trap

Asked to reflect on D-Day, Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, spoke of “the high cost of not pushing back against fascism and authoritarianism early on.”

The slaughter at Omaha Beach and elsewhere that day, was “the only way to displace the German aggression, because we let it get so far down the road without confronting it, at a super-high cost in American lives.”

In the 1930s, as the German war machine revved up, and German Panzers blitzkrieged across Europe, “there were America First isolationists, and, frankly, Christian Nationalists, who were sympathetic to Hitler, or were ambivalent, and thought that it was not our concern. “

Huffman warns against “sleepwalking into the same trap” today.

“I’m not suggesting we need to get need to get American troops onto the ground in Ukraine, or anything like that. But we sure as hell need to be confronting Russia, by way of Ukraine, as they are fighting for their survival. And we sure as hell should be taking authoritarianism and fascism around the world, seriously.”

He finds it worrisome that “many Americans” are unbothered by fascism in Europe, and also that “they seem pretty sanguine about bringing it to the United States.”

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By:  AUSTIN MURPHY
Source: The Press Democrat