These D-Day war heroes expose West's shame for looking the other way

To say we are forever in their debt, that they have our eternal gratitude, feels like a monstrous understatement. Because while it’s true – they’re just words. Wonderful, beautiful, heartfelt words – but words nonetheless. And as moving as they are, they don’t begin to convey what those heroes of the D-Day landings actually did, the sacrifices they made for this country and its people. Because quite simply – nothing ever can.

Only they know the price they have paid for our freedoms.

Those ancient warriors on their crutches and in their wheelchairs in Normandy this week are titans of men. Age has left many of them weakened and withered, but not for a second has it dimmed their spirit, that bright, blinding spirit that propelled them onto those blood-soaked beaches in Normandy 80 years ago.

Listening to their stories, most were terrified. They weren’t thinking about the quest to quash Hitler’s tyranny as they waded through the Channel’s cold waters that bright, breezy morning. They were praying just to stay alive, that their courage wouldn’t fail them, that they wouldn’t fail their comrades and that they’d live to hold the people they love again.

They also prayed that, if death was to take them that terrible day, it would be quick – all things we in our cosseted lives have never had to face.

What those men did in Normandy was the beginning of the end of Hitler’s Nazism. They changed the course of history and helped create a world free of oppression for the millions not yet born. Which is why it makes me rage when people today casually fling the word Nazi around not knowing what it actually means. Those ancient warriors know exactly what it means, and they were prepared to give their lives to stop it coming here.

I’ve been reading these old soldiers' stories this week with tears streaming down my face but, even that seems self-indulgent, imagine the tears they have shed down the years. Imagine the hell, the horror, that 80 years on still haunts their dreams.

This was the generation that didn’t talk about what they’d seen, what they’d had to do. People just didn’t back then. And so those that could just got on with their lives at God knows what cost to their deadened souls.

Maybe some felt that was better than the alternative – to be lying in a grave in a Normandy cemetery. Maybe others didn’t because, often, the guilt and the pain of surviving when so many of your comrades have fallen is a burden too much to bear.

But if those war horses in Normandy this week felt that – it didn’t show. They were grateful for the recognition, for the love and to just be alive.

I pray to God that young people today understand the relevance of D-Day, that they see more than just a bunch of old men with racks of medals across their chest. Because these men are, and represent, way more than that. They are the heroes most of us will never become. They are men who risked all to help create a new world where young men and women don’t have to live under the iron fist of oppression. And I worry that many young people today don’t know what that means.

Maybe they think D-Day was all a long time ago and could never happen again. But they’d be wrong because it IS happening right now at the heart of Europe in Ukraine. Brave men and women without the weapons they need to fight Putin are fighting anyway – many to the death.

And the shame of the West is that we have stopped looking at it. We have stopped talking about it because it’s too uncomfortable. Putin is doing what Hitler tried to – and the West is looking the other way. What would have happened if those soldiers in Normandy yesterday had looked the other way…