A European Journey 80 years after D-Day

Posted On June 5, 2024

AS I LEFT my house in London that morning, I passed the door of another: a house where once I heard the stories of an old soldier. He came to live in my street for what became the last years of his life.

Victor Syborn was part of the D-Day invasion force eighty years ago. His modesty led him to point out that he had not been in the first wave of those who reached the beaches. ‘If I had been, I don’t suppose I would be talking to you now,’ he would add. He went all the way from Normandy to Berlin.

I spent an evening with him before Christmas one year. That night, he recounted his experiences in the newly-captured German capital. He told the story of being approached by a resident seeking help after the Red Army had looted his apartment. Victor persuaded the Soviet soldiers to return the man’s treasured piano.

Victor died in 2019, aged 99–two years after the French government had awarded him and his fellow D-Day veterans the Legion D’Honneur in a ceremony at the French embassy in London.

I remembered Victor that morning as I passed what his old house. I left early, before 5am. I had a long journey. If I have time, I prefer to travel in Europe by rail rather than air. That day I was to take trains to Hamburg on my way to Denmark.

Cologne station, Germany, 31 May 2024 © James Rodgers

After the Eurostar to Brussels, I travelled on to Cologne, and then Hamburg, where I arrived in the early evening. My journey took me through cities destroyed during that war in which D-Day was such an important moment. Cologne was one of them, as this 1945 photograph from the archive of the U.S. Department of Defense shows. The station was rebuilt at the end of the railway bridge that was itself reconstructed across the Rhine. It lies in the shadow of the cathedral, so close that I was able to go out to take a look while I waited for my train to Hamburg.

Cologne, Germany, 24 April 1945. U.S. Defense Visual Information Center. photo HD-SN-99-02996https://www.archives.gov/research/arc/ ARC Identifier: 531287;

For my writing, for my teaching, and for personal interest, I read a lot of history. I had with me on this trip the latest issues of both History Today (where I am on the editorial advisory board) and BBC History.

Both featured D-Day on the front covers. As my journey continued on Saturday, I found myself in a compartment with two German fellow-passengers. While my German is just about good enough for basic conversation–we chatted about long-distance train travel, they were both on the way to Sweden–I am not fluent enough to explain why I was reading about the war. I do realize there is much more to modern Germany than its militaristic past. I hoped they realized I was not reading about the war because I want to understand what I hope will never be repeated.

For I have always felt very fortunate that–as a western European man–I was born in the second half of the last century, and not the first, when I would almost certainly have had to go to war. I was born in the 1960s, in a Europe shaped by the Second World War–a war that in turn was shaped by D-Day.

It is also a war that had its roots in the politics of hate and instability in the years that preceded it–when discontent, aggression, hatred, and division, spread across the continent like fuel waiting to be set afire.

The Kiel Canal, seen from the train © James Rodgers

War has not returned to western Europe, though it has returned to the east, in Ukraine–and affected the continent as a whole. It may yet go further.

Political extremism, herald of the last continent-wide war, is back. The day I left London, Reuters reported on recent successes for the far-right ‘Alternative for Germany’ in local elections. The agency’s correspondents wrote, ‘Such events were for decades unthinkable in a Germany so traumatised by the Nazi era that it installed checks and balances to prevent right-wing extremists ever taking power again.’

There is political violence, too. The same day, there was a stabbing attack on ‘an anti-Islam rally’ in the city of Mannheim. A police officer who tried to stop the attacker later died of his wounds.

Outside Hamburg station, I passed an election poster for the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance–a movement, in the words of Deutsche Welle, ‘Blending left-leaning economic policies with conservative migration and populist pro-Russian foreign policy initiatives.’

The last stage of my journey took me from Hamburg (the photo at the top of this post was taken that morning) to Esbjerg, on the Danish west coast. Eighty years after D-Day, the sand dunes of the island of Fanø, across a narrow sound, are still scarred with Second World War bunkers and gun emplacements, built by occupying German forces. They feared the allied invasion might come from the north, via Denmark, rather than from northern France–and fortified Fanø accordingly.

In 2017, the year after my country voted to leave the European Union, I wrote for The New European on how the German tourist trade on Fanø meant that former foes had developed a better, mutually beneficial, relationship in the passing decades.

This week, as Europe remembers D-Day, and the populist right hopes for gains in the European parliamentary elections on Sunday, we should remember that the peace we have known almost 80 years in this part of Europe is not normal in European history. It is a precious era worth preserving and prolonging–though the threats Europe now faces means it may not last.

Graffiti on a Second World War bunker, Fanø, Denmark, August 2023. © James Rodgers

All text and photos, except the US Defense Dept image of wartime Cologne, © James Rodgers