In a way, D-Day sums up for us the whole of World War Ⅱ. It was the frontal clash of two ideas, a collision between the possibility of human freedom and its nullification. Even now, we are still learning what to make of it, still trying to know whether we are dwarfed by the scale of such an effort or whether what happened that day still enlarges us. It certainly enlarges the veterans of Normandy and their friends who died in every zone of that war. It’s tempting to politicize the memory of a day so full of personal and national honor, too easy to allude to the wars of our times as if they naturally mirrored World War Ⅱ. The ironic starkness of the forces that met on the beaches of Normandy makes that temptation all the greater. But beyond the resemblance of young soldiers dying in wars 60 years apart1, there is no analogy, and that is something we must remember today as well. D-Day was the result of broad international accord. By D-Day, Europe had been at war—total war—for nearly five years, at profound cost to its civilian population. American civilians, in turn, had willingly made enormous material sacrifices to sustain the war effort. There was no pretense that ordinary life would go on uninterrupted and no assumption that America could go it alone.