The IHT's D-Day Coverage

The International Herald Tribune is rightly devoting this week to a series of D-Day articles, along with a reading list and slide shows of D-Day photos and of June 1944 front pages (from its predecessor, the New York Herald Tribune). Some titles:

• For Britain, D-Day success redeemed the shame of Dunkirk
• Out of the night sky like phantoms: Sainte-Mère-Eglise remembers
• Sacrifices in Normandy live on in the European memory
• On cliff over Omaha Beach, a man who fought remembers
• 'Dying, nearly everybody dying'

Check all of these out, as well as the other stories (with more on Thursday and Friday). But I'd especially like to quote a passage from David Stafford's piece:

Recently, in researching for a book about D-Day, I stumbled on a secret diary kept by a Resistance leader in a Gestapo prison. He had pricked out its words on pieces of toilet paper, rolled them up tightly, and dropped them down the ventilation shaft in his cell, where they were recovered after the war. In solitary confinement he spent much of his time wondering when D-Day would come. "It is only those who are under the Gestapo's whip," he wrote in one of his entries, "with the death sentence as an ever-threatening danger, who completely understand what victory means."

It kind of makes you wonder, do the French understand that people in Saddam Hussein's jails may have uttered similar words while the mass graves filled up with 300,- to 400,000 corpses over three decades ("It is only those who are under the Mukhabarat's whip, with the death sentence as an ever-threatening danger, who completely understand what victory means")? Or is that something that should be dismissed, and mocked, out of hand, as the French are so wont to do?

Also, check out the Mike Lester cartoon at the bottom of this page, the Kirk Walters cartoon at the bottom of this page, the Robert Ariail cartoon at the bottom of this page, and the Danish cartoon at the top of this page.