Commentary: What Virginians’ and Americans’ D-Day Sacrifices Teach Us About Our Country Now

NORMANDY AMERICAN CEMETERY, COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, FRANCE- Richard Powhatan Hall’s grave sits nine rows into the vast final resting place of 9,400 U.S. soldiers who lost their lives in the 1944 D-Day invasion. Hall, a man from Virginia’s Albemarle County, was killed in action on June 6, 1944, at Omaha Beach, a few hundred yards from where he is buried.

Richard Hall, a man from Virginia’s Albemarle County, was killed in action June 6, 1944 at Omaha Beach, seen here, in America’s D-Day invasion. (Photo by Jim Spencer/Virginia Mercury)

He died at 26 fighting fascism.

Hall was among 184 Virginians who gave their lives to spearhead an extended assault that eventually led to Paris, then Berlin, and brought down Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, a regime powered by hate and intolerance.

The Virginia dead included the Bedford 20, a group of young men from the same small town in the southwest region of the state. They became the best-known Old Dominion D-Day casualties for their community’s collective sacrifice.

Bedford lost more residents per capita than any other community in the United States on D-Day, as far as is known, according to John Long, education director of the National D-Day Memorial. To the best of historians’ knowledge, the state of Virginia lost more residents per capita in the D-Day mission than any other state in the union, Long said.

Ruined remains of German gun emplacements still stud the high bluffs above the Atlantic coast. The gun emplacements, considered nearly impenetrable during World War II, have evolved into monuments of the shared pain and desperately hard work it took to overcome fascism.

U.S. Army Rangers who scaled the near-vertical rock face of Pont du Hoc used ropes and knives shoved into small cracks to propel themselves upward into enemy fire. Their courage symbolized the difficulty and determination of the entire campaign.

As Long noted, “They obviously knew they were going into battle. I’ve never talked to a veteran of World War II who would not admit that they were scared.”

The July 13, 1944, edition of The Bedford Democrat newspaper details the names of men from the county who perished in World War II up to that point. (Photo courtesy Library of Virginia)

Many of those killed on D-Day were entering combat for the first time, Long said. But they also knew that they were in a crucial battle between good and evil.

The U.S. worked with its allies, England and Canada, in those days. The leader of the invasion, U.S. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, ultimately made the decisions. But he led with power that considered other viewpoints. That birthed a spirit of cooperation and adaptation that overcame everything that went wrong on D-Day, a spirit that had to extend to the troops for anything to succeed.

In his Order of the Day, Eisenhower referred to what was about to happen as a “Great Crusade.”

This crusade required more than brilliant tacticians or seasoned soldiers. It relied on guys like Hall, who, before the war, worked for a Charlottesville Ford dealership, according to his obituary.

Hall, the Bedford 20, most of the rest of the lost Virginians, and more than 9,000 other Americans who died in the D-Day invasion were not military professionals. They were mostly average Joes who understood and accepted the obligation of their country’s commitment to freedom from dictators.

Standing among seemingly endless rows of U.S. grave markers in Normandy inevitably invites a comparison of America’s spirit on D-Day and today.

On D-Day, the U.S. aligned itself with allies. It did not alienate or publicly lecture them, as our government leaders currently do. The country felt a shared responsibility to the world in a war that was not being fought on American soil. That commitment sprang from ideology instead of property. Freedom from authoritarian rule was the goal, but not just in an abstract sense.

To fight on D-Day meant facing daunting physical risks to take down the enemy or die trying.

“By and large, allied leaders made it clear this was a battle of good versus evil that had to be won,” Long said. “They had a sense of what they had to do and why.”

But there was also a personal sense of the mission, reliant on individual survival instincts to succeed. The only path to victory was up the bluffs.

“Their thinking,” said Long, “was that taking those bluffs was how they got to go home.”

Thousands didn’t. Still, they trusted in leaders whose integrity made it worth the try.

In a country whose leaders routinely lie or use their positions to expand personal authority and wealth, such trust cannot exist.

This is the country we now live in. It is a place where the president punishes institutions that practice traditional values of tolerance, opportunity and compassion.

It is a place where the president calls the late Sen. John McCain, a hero who suffered years of torture for his service in the Vietnam War, a “loser.”

We now live in a place where white nationalists and misogynists masquerading as war experts strip promotions from black and female military officers, and the president, a draft dodger who never served, pursues military policies so devoid of tactical rationale and legality that America’s finest officers must resign because they cannot in good conscience follow what they believe to be illegal orders.

Our highest political leader today believes that undocumented immigrants deserve no constitutional rights and can be separated from their children and thrown into detention facilities for months without court hearings.

We now live in a country where the same leader encourages government agents to attack protesters.  The Trump administration initially refused to cooperate with state investigators seeking facts in the killings of two legal Minnesota residents by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. A judge had to order the administration to release evidence.

ICE officer fatally shoots driver through car window in Minneapolis

Finally, and perhaps most tragically, instead of fighting fascism, today we live in a country where the leader spreads lies about election fraud when he loses, then encourages an attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power.

The attack injured police and led to several deaths. It cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. It led to 1,500 criminal convictions. But the leader, shielded from personal criminal prosecution by conservative Supreme Court justices, pardoned the criminals who did his bidding.

What Americans did in 1944 on the beaches at Normandy showed greatness and selflessness. What Donald Trump has done in his time as president is destroy Americans’ sense of unity and responsibility, which gave us the strength to defeat Hitler.

On this D-Day anniversary, that begs an ugly question for every American:

How did the United States go from fighting fascism in 1944 to embracing it in 2026?

by Jim Spencer, Virginia Mercury

Virginia Mercury is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Samantha Willis for questions: info@virginiamercury.com.