Of D-Day and Dead Leaves
It’s June 6, the day when Spitzbergen tipped the balance on the Western Front.
D-Day wasn’t supposed to happen, according to the German weather forecasters. The storm that preceded and followed that day was not supposed to have any break.
But earlier in the war, Britain and Canada had retaken from the Germans the Svalbard Archipelago, including its largest island, Spitzbergen. The name, given by Dutch explorer Willem Barents in 1596, means “jagged peaks;” today the largest of three settlements is called Longyearbyen. As those names suggest, the place is about as remote as any place humans inhabit: above Iceland, above Finland, north of most of Greenland, inside the Arctic Circle at 78-79 degrees latitude.
But in June of 1944, Spitzbergen had something that made all the difference: weather information the Germans lacked. With it, Allied forecasters predicted a period of calm in the otherwise stormy conditions. Eisenhower wrestled with the decision, but finally said the invasion was on.
All through the German occupation of Europe, the BBC would send out nightly messages to resistance fighters: “Uncle Henry is going shopping;” “The beach is good for swimming today;” and so on—bland phrases that the Underground knew as their signals to undertake particular actions.
But for the day of The Invasion, Allied Intelligence and the Free French had reserved a poem by Paul Verlaine that almost every Frenchman knew, and knew to be one of the great ornaments of French culture. It’s not long, but within it is some of the world’s finest word music:
LES sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon cœur
D’une langueur
Monotone.
Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l’heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure;
Et je m’en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m’emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.
Translation is never entirely satisfactory, but this poem is among those generally considered beyond translation, because the rhythm and tone vanish. But most people can understand that autumn is a time when melancholy thoughts often come: when the bell tolls the hour, I think of times gone by, and I cry. For the French people, after years of German occupiers taking their food, their able men for slave labor, and their culture, those words about former times and tears had especially intense meaning.
I’m a poet, and I’m partway through a translation, foolhardy as that may seem—because I know how the invasion began. Here’s an equivalent of the last lines: “And I give myself to the fitful wind, which sweeps me/ Hither and thither as lifeless as the leaves beneath me.”
The pilots carrying the paratroopers who were to be the spearhead of the invasion did such an incompetent and in some cases cowardly job that Eisenhower, though busy as the overall commander, took time to give the flyers a personal dressing down, in terms they never forgot and on future missions heeded. But on D-Day, they made it Death Day for many, many parachutists: some plunged into fields the Germans had flooded and were dragged down by their heavy packs and drowned; some were dropped directly onto German units, who shredded them with machine guns as they dangled helplessly in the air; one was even sent down a well to his doom.
“Deçà, delà, pareil à la feuille morte” indeed.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a naval battle was being fought that truly turned the course of the war against Japan. Rent the film “Midway,” it’s astonishingly accurate, after you factor out the obligatory Hollywood love story.
Tolkien insisted that “Lord of the Rings” wasn’t an allegory of World War II, but it’s hard to believe there wasn’t some influence, especially the idea of wildly diverse and at first widely scattered and disorganized set of forces finally overwhelming the monolithic concentration of power. Here’s the Pacific Ocean, somewhere out there is a Japanese invasion fleet. Here’s torpedo plane squadron leader Waldron, Sioux blood in his veins: disregarding all advice, “He just lit a shuck for the horizon,” someone who watched him said, and he found the enemy aircraft carriers, and died trying to sink them, like almost all of the torpedo pilots. Then, with the Japanese fighters all down at ocean level because of those sacrifices (“These Americans! They fight like samurai!”), high in the sky appeared the American dive bombers. “Ram it home, girls!” their leader shouts over the radio, and down they come, and drop bombs on the big rising suns painted on the decks of three of the four Japanese aircraft carriers—the fourth was destroyed later as well—and with those stroke they ended any hope of the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere dominating the Pacific.
I’m amazed that all the hoop-la over D-Day keeps eclipsing this other, purely American, even more successful effort. But so it is with time and human endeavors: “Deçà, delà, pareil à la feuille morte.”
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