Why we commemorate D-Day, 80 years later

This week, the former Western Allies commemorated the 80th anniversary of their greatest World War II achievement, the June 6, 1944, landings in Normandy, France — forever famed as D-Day.

The pomp and circumstance of the grand events attended by United States President Joe Biden and other national leaders are entirely justified by the magnitude of that endeavor. More than 40 years ago, while writing a book about the campaign, I had the privilege of meeting many veterans — American, British, Canadian, Polish, French, German.

I remember in particular an exuberant New Yorker, a former shipping clerk named Lindley Higgins, who sought to strip the story of an excess of romance: "We were a singularly callous and unfeeling group of young men.” Aged 19, in the weeks before D-Day, he found it hard to grasp the reality of what was coming. "Me, Lindley Higgins, from Riverdale in the Bronx, was about to invade France. It was a problem that my mind, in its then state of maturity, couldn’t possibly cope with.”