The National D-Day Memorial: Art, Empire, and Nationalism at an American Military Monument

Abstract

This study investigates the material origins and symbolic operations of the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia as it has evolved over the past fifteen years. The study also analyzes the ideological myths of American nationalism underpinning this symbolic site of remembrance and national identity. The checkered success of this heritage site as well as its strange ideological role during the post-2001 global “War on Terror” have much to say about how art is used in different corners of empires to serve different political purposes.

Notes

¹ Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 3.

² Anthony Smith, National Identity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 72.

³ Ernst Renan, Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? (Paris: Sorbonne, 1882), p. 2.

⁴ Wayne Norman, “Theorizing Nationalism (Normatively),” in Ronald Beiner (ed.), Theorizing Nationalism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), pp. 51–65.

⁵ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edition (London: Verso, 1991), p. 5.

⁶ Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995), pp. 1–12.

⁷ Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).

⁸ Oxford English Dictionary, compact edition, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

⁹ Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 335.

¹⁰ See < http://www.defenselink.mil/news/june2001/N6072001_20010672.html>.

¹¹ Stephen Ambrose, D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

¹² Stephen Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beach to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 to May 7, 1945 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997); and Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).

¹³ James Morrison, “June 6, 1944, Has the Memorial It Deserves,” Roanoke Times, June 6, 2005, p. V7.

¹⁴ See < http://www.roanoke.com/dday/memorial>.

¹⁵ See < http://www.roanoke.com/dday/memorial/memorial119.html>. A local veteran, Bob Slaughter, who went ashore in Normandy on Omaha Beach in the third wave with the 29^th Division, began a campaign to build a D-Day memorial in Bedford, Virginia after retiring in 1987. Aged nineteen in 1944, he later became chairman of the National D-Day Memorial Foundation in the 1990s. At age seventy-six, he escorted President George W. Bush to the dedication ceremony on June 6, 2001.

¹⁶ Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008), p. 271.

¹⁷ Also see Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy, rev. edition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), pp. 278–286.

¹⁸ See < http://www.defenselink.mil/news/june2001/n06072001_20016072.html>.

¹⁹ See < http://www.dday.org/html/calendar.html>.

²⁰ See < http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/2001/06/print/20010606-2.html>.

²¹ Timothy W. Luke, “History as an Ideo-Political Commodity: The 1984 D-Day Spectacle,” New Political Science, 5:1 (1984), pp. 49–67.

²² Scott Wilson, “Destiny … Has Always Been Up to Us,” Washington Post, June 7, 2009, pp. A1, A15.

²³ Gregor Dallas, 1945: The War that Never Ended (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

²⁴ Timothy W. Luke, “Hyper-Power or Hype-Power? The USA after Kandahar, Karbala and Katrina,” in Francois Debrix and Mark J. Lacy (eds), The Geopolitics of American Insecurity: Terror, Power and Foreign Policy (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 18–33.

²⁵ See Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 3–6.

²⁶ Faust, This Republic of Suffering, p. 271.

²⁷ Ambrose, Band of Brothers.

²⁸ Luke, “History as an Ideo-Political Commodity,” pp. 49–67.

²⁹ Midas Dekkers, The Way of All Flesh: The Romance of Ruins (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), p. 243.

³⁰ Stephen Croad et al., The War Memorials Handbook (London: Imperial War Museum, 2001).

³¹ John Garfield, The Fallen: A Photographic Journey through the War Cemeteries and Memorials of the Great War, 1914–1918, 2nd ed. (Kent: Spellmount, 2003), p. 14.

³² Lyn MacDonald, 1914–1918: Voices and Images of the Great War (London: Penguin, 1988).

³³ Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg, Director (Dreamworks, 1998).

³⁴ Steven Spielberg (ed.), Saving Private Ryan (New York: New Market Press, 1998).

³⁵ Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin Press, 2009).

³⁶ Faust, This Republic of Suffering, p. 268.

³⁷ Wilson, “Destiny … Has Always Been Up to Us.”

³⁸ Courtney Cutright, “D-Day Memorial at Risk of Closing,” Roanoke Times, May 29, 2009, pp. N1, 10.

³⁹ Rex Bowman, “D-Day Shrine's Status is Mulled,” Roanoke Times, August 27, 2009, pp. N1, 22.

⁴⁰ Mason Adams, “Bill Calls for Study of Memorial,” Roanoke Times, July 25, 2009, p. N8.

⁴¹ See < http://www.harvardregiment.org/memorial.htm>, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1895 [1884], “The Soldier's Faith: An Address Delivered on Memorial Day, May 30, 1895, at a Meeting Called by the Graduating Class of Harvard University”; also see < http://www.harvardregiment.org/holmesfa.htm>.

⁴² Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation Speaks: Letters and Reflections (New York: Random House, 1999).

⁴³ Holmes, Jr.,“The Soldier's Faith.”

⁴⁴ Ibid.