Upon the Altar of Omaha Beach
After Vietnam, Americans needed D-Day to remind them what they imagined United States once was and should be again. But well before then, the soldiers who laid down their lives on the altar of Omaha Beach provided the proof to Kennedy’s later claim that the United States was willing to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
Lecture Description
On June 6, 1944, American and British forces landed on five beaches in Normandy, each with its own code name. Yet in the United States, only one is widely remembered—Omaha—and it is the only beach where almost nothing went according to plan. In this 40-minute talk, Professor Hall explores the reasons why a narrowly-averted disaster has become one of the most iconic American battles in all of American history and how it continues to influence the ways in which Americans and others perceive the United States’ role in the world.