Patrick Comerford
There have been two important anniversaries over the past week or two: the 85th anniversary of the Battle of Crete in 1941, and the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day landings in 1944.
Both recall the sacrifices made by so many. It is important remember that both the D-Day landings and the Battle of Crete were key landmarks in the struggle against the anti-democratic, far-right racism that had enslaved most of Europe and that by 1944 threatened too to engulf or overwhelm Britain which had not yet been invaded by the forces of fascism.
The D-Day landings marked the beginning of the end of fascism, for that generation. As the far-right tries to stir up hatred against people fleeing in small boats across the Channel, victimising vulnerable people who are seeking sanctuary from oppression, at home, I remind myself that 82 years ago a flotilla of boats in the Channel on D-Day marked the turning of the tide against racism and the far-right across Europe.
But victory is only of the day, at best of the generation. The anti-democratic and racist far-right must be named, shamed, and stopped once again. The collaborators with fascism in Britain in the 1930s, Oswald Moseley and his blackshirt thugs, were humiliated at the Battle of Cable Street 90 years ago in 1936, but they still had to be locked away for the duration of World War II.
Meanwhile, in the small and petty minds of JD Vance and Pete Hegseth, Europe is under siege, civilisation is collapsing, western values are in retreat, migration is threatening social cohesion, and the future of Europe hangs in the balance.
Pete Hegseth, who wants us all to call the US Defence Department the US War Department, tried during the weekend to warp and twist the meaning and significance of the D-Day landings and to hijack the anniversary for his own twisted and warped political agenda.
It is bewildering that this critique of life in Europe is being advanced by senior politicians from the US, where thousands of children die from gun violence every year, where mass shootings have become routine, where political polarisation is actively encouraged by the regime, and where trust in the institutions of democracy and justice continue to vaporise.
Who gave Pete Hegseth or JD Vance the right to lecture anyone or anywhere in Europe about justice, about human rights, about the risks and dangers of war, about core values and social cohesion?
My grandfather fought in the Gallipoli landings during World War I, and was then sent to Thessaloniki and the Balkan front. He caught malaria, was sent home in 1916, and my father was conceived soon after. But the malaria he caught in northern Greece was incurable, and he died a lonely and frightening death on 21 January 1921, soon after my father’s second birthday, leaving my widowed grandmother and four sons and two daughters.
Ireland was neutral during World War II, as were most European countries until they were invaded. But my father spent much of that war in a cavalry intelligence unit in the reserve army (LDF). He would later recall that when German military personnel, Nazi agents or spies were caught in Ireland, they were sent to prison camps where they spent the rest of the war; when his unit met Irish personnel who were in the British or allied forces and who were on leave for family visits, they ensured they had the fare to return to their units or their bases.
It was clear to my father whose side Ireland was neutral in favour of. He later rejoiced in the acclamation for one of his childhood friends, the journalist and writer Cornelius Ryan (1920-1974), known for his award-winning book The Longest Day: 6 June 1944 D-Day (1959), which was turned into the 1962 film The Longest Day. Both men were in their teens when they visited Rome a few years before World War II began and were shocked then by what they saw of fascism in Mussolini’s Italy.
In their own way, men like these passed on to my generation an acute awareness of the horrors and the sacrifices entailed in war, and an appreciation for others in their generation who risked their lives to save European civilisation from fascism and Nazism. In the previous generation, my grandfather had learned and experienced the horrors of war in Turkey and Greece.
In a posting last year I recalled the names of the dead from World War II from the extended Comerford families that I have found recorded on memorials and graves by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The 19 members of this extended family I have found to date on Commonwealth War Graves include soldiers in the D-Day landings, merchant seamen torpedoed in Atlantic convoys, brothers and sisters, and prisoners of war of the Japanese in Borneo, Burma (Myanmar), Hong Kong and Japan.
They are buried or commemorated in the Phaleron War Cemetery near Athens, in Normandy, Hong Kong, Thanbyuzayat War Cemetery and the Rangoon Memorial in Burma (Myanmar), Yokohama War Cemetery in Japan, and the Labuan Memorial on Labuan Island off the coast of Sabah in Borneo, Malaysia.
Thomas Matthew Commerford, a trooper, Royal Armoured Corps, 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars, was 36 when he died on 19 August 1944 after the Normandy Landings. He is named in Banneville-la-Campagne War Cemetery and left a widow in Sunbury.
In Europe, we do not need lessons on the consequences of dangerous ideologies. An entire generation was buried after World War I, millions more were buried after World War II. The Holocaust was a European experience, not confined or limited to one country. The Cold War was a European experience that lasted for half a century after World War II.
We have cemeteries, war graves and Holocaust memorials across the entire continent because of wars and because of war-mongers and extreme political ideologies. When Pete Hegseth and JD Vance warn Europe about ideological invasions, we know where the threat comes from today.
In Europe at the weekend we were reminded that are now exposed to a dangerous foreign ideology, one obsessed with culture wars, one that sees compromise as weakness, one that turns every disagreement into an existential battle, one that relies on fear and outrage and creates phantom enemies rather than developing political strategies and government programmes to meet the real needs of real people.
And just as Oswald Moseley became the mouthpiece for Hitler and Mussolini on the streets of Britain in the 1930s, Farage and Lowe have become mouthpieces for the Oval Office 90 years later, the hand-picked voices for Elon Muck, stirring up the baying mobs on the streets and in the towns of Britain.
In his weekend rant, Hegseth claimed: ‘Beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.’ Who was praying to? What does he truly believe in?
My grandfather suffered on the beaches of Gallipoli and in the Bay of Thessaloniki as a victim of ideological war mongering 110 years ago.
The people of Crete still remember 85 years later the consequences of invasions engineered and directed by far-right regimes.
The threat of invasion across Europe today comes not from the frightened families on small boats crossing the Channel or arriving on beaches in southern Europe, or from huddled families crossing borders in the dead of night. The threat to Europe comes today in social media, cable television, political influencers and visiting politicians and moguls who pretend they are the guardians of western civilisation.
When Vance ignores the wishes of Henry Nowak’s families and lectures people here about protecting children and preserving civilisation, I cannot but realise the irony in all of this considering how thousands of children and teenagers are killed in gun violence in the US every year. When he repeats the prattling of Farage and Lowe about ‘two-tier’ policing, I cannot but realise the irony as I recall how ICE kills protesters on the streets of the US without any consideration of due process or accountability and ponder how a pompous president plots to use public funds to reward the rioters who stormed the Capitol violently on 6 January 2021. One of those rioters, Elias Irizarry, has even been given a key security role in Hegseth’s Pentagon.
Democracy survives not through fear but through restraint, not through outrage but through institutions that guarantee justice, not through cultural wars but through coexistence. My grandfather who landed on the Gallipoli beaches and went on to catch malaria in Thessaloniki, those who died in the trenches of the Somme, the brave but frightened boatloads who crossed the Channel to the beaches of Normandy, those buried in mass graves across Europe, each and very one of them continues to remind the rest of us of what happens when politics becomes a crusade and opponents become enemies.
The Nazi spies my father helped to track down and put away for the duration of World War II in supposedly neutral Ireland were searching for collaborators and potential provocateurs among people whose political heirs and descendants today are in the parties led by Farage and Lowe.
Hegseth’s rambling rant at the weekend in Normandy was described by the historian Simon Schema as a ‘special kind of loathsomeness: a blend of historical deafness, grotesque stupidity and comically ludicrous self-importance. As if the little people’s rage immigration is somehow superior to to the war against the Third Reich and entitles this comic-book nobody to lecture the actual heroes.’ One local resident Colleville-sur-Mer is quoted in The Guardian today as saying: ‘The words must be spoken, he must be called out for who he is, for the values he represents: colonial, warmongering, racist, far-right values. Silence seems to us to be the worst thing we can do on these issues.’
