‘We will not walk away’: Biden doubles down on support for Ukraine at D-Day anniversary

Omaha Beach, Normandy: Forty years ago, US President Ronald Reagan stood on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France and delivered perhaps the finest speech of his time in the White House.

“For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow,” he said.

King Charles, left, and French President Emmanuel Macron talk following the UK commemorative event at the British Normandy Memorial to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, in Ver-sur-Mer, France.Credit: AP

“Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.”

That address marking the 40th anniversary on D-Day, the Allied landings to liberate Nazi-occupied France, is now as long ago as the remarkable event at the time when Reagan reflected on it.

With an average of 200 World War II veterans dying every day, this will likely be the last major D-Day anniversary with a sizable group of veterans in attendance. Indeed, if a veteran was 18 on D-Day, he would be 103 by the time the 85th anniversary arrives in 2029.

Even in 1984, D-Day was a hazy memory for many people. The United States was still healing from the deep psychic wounds of the Vietnam War, and the West faced a menacing adversary in the Soviet Union.

Queen Camilla with King Charles III and French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron beneath the D-Day Sculpture at the British Normandy Memorial to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day. Credit: Getty

Yet Reagan – who was facing re-election at home – warned that America had bitter valuable lessons from two world wars.

“It is better to be here ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost,” he said. “We’ve learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent.”

At Omaha Beach on Thursday the world’s leaders gathered to pay homage to those remarkable men who took the beaches that morning.

They were joined by a dwindling number of veterans in a parade of wheelchairs to honour the dead, the living, and the fight for democracy in moving commemorations on and around those same beaches where they landed exactly 80 years ago.

Shortly after midnight on June 6, 1944, Allied forces commenced landing airborne troops.

(Audio from June 6, 1944 is embedded below; the first reports of the invasion on American radio, a recording from a US ship off the coast of Normandy as it comes under attack from a Nazi plane).

American assault troops of the 16th Infantry Regiment, injured while storming Omaha Beach, wait for evacuation to a field hospital in this photo taken at Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944.

At dawn, naval vessels would begin landing troops on beaches codenamed Utah and Omaha for the American forces, and Gold, Juno and Sword for the British and Canadians.

About 156,000 soldiers landed on the Normandy beaches: 195,700 naval personnel on almost 7000 vessels. Although the bulk of the forces in the landings were British, American and Canadian, more than a dozen Allied nations participated in the operation. It remains the biggest seaborne invasion in history.

Of the 4414 Allied troops killed on D-Day, 13 were Australians. In the ensuing Battle of Normandy, 73,000 Allied forces were killed and 153,000 wounded. The battle – and especially Allied bombings of French villages and cities – killed about 20,000 French civilians.

Some call D-Day the “successful beginning of the end of Hitler’s tyrannical regime”. Others refer to it as the “most significant victory of the Western Allies in the Second World War”.

Among those at Thursday’s commemorations was Ukraine’s President Volodomyr Zelensky, whose presence was met with loud applause, fusing World War II’s awful past with the fraught present.

More applause followed when a giant screen showed the Ukrainian leader speaking and embracing US veterans.

It was as if Reagan’s words of 40 years ago could have been repeated with as much relevance. And after two years of grinding combat in Ukraine, the US and Europe are still scrambling to increase weapons deliveries to Kyiv to counter Russian advances.

The rise of China as a military power, meanwhile, is also driving a years-long pivot of US forces toward the Pacific and away from Europe and the Middle East.

With US elections later this year, Trump – the presumptive Republican presidential candidate – has cast doubt over Washington’s long-term commitment to European allies that cut corners on military spending, raising questions about the willingness of the US to defend them against Russian aggression.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky embraces a veteran of D-Day at the 80th anniversary of the invasion, as his wife Olena and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau look on.

Mindful of the war in Europe raging 80 years later following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, US President Joe Biden, King Charles, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron all paid tribute to the tens of thousands of Allied troops who took part.

Biden, at a cliff-top memorial commemorating the capture by American troops of a German gun battery, said D-Day showed the need for international alliances, in a pointed swipe at his election rival ex-president Donald Trump, who has publicly questioned the importance of organisations such as NATO.

“We’re living in a time when democracy is more at risk across the world than at any point since the end of World War II,” Biden said.

“Make no mistake, the autocrats of the world are watching closely to see what happens in Ukraine; to see if we let this illegal aggression go unchecked,” he said. “We cannot let that happen. To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators, is simply unthinkable.”

He was unequivocal on ongoing American support for Ukraine: “Ukrainians are fighting with extraordinary courage, suffering great losses, but never backing down.

“They have inflicted on the Russian aggression tremendous losses. We will not walk away. Because if we do, Ukraine will be subjugated.”

War again has come to Europe. This image shows a drone view of a building damaged by Russia in the centre of Kyiv.Credit: Getty

He then echoed Reagan’s message: “Isolationism was not the answer 80 years ago and is not the answer today”, and added that “real alliances make us stronger – a lesson that I pray we Americans never forget”.

In his address earlier in the morning, the King – who has made only a few public appearances since his cancer diagnosis in February – told the crowd that the world was fortunate that a generation “did not flinch” when they were called upon.

“Our obligation to remember what they stood for and what they achieved for us all can never diminish,” he said, wearing his Field Marshal No 4 Tropical Service dress uniform with medals and decorations.

Speaking in French, he paid tribute to those who faced what he said his grandfather George VI had described as “the supreme test”, honouring the “unimaginable number” of French civilians killed in the battle for Normandy, and the bravery and sacrifice of the French Resistance.

D-Day veterans are applauded by the crowd after a parade with a Royal Guard Of Honour in Arromanches-les-Bains, France.Credit: Getty

He also spoke of the war against tyranny, leaving those in attendance with no doubt he was referring to current-day events.

“We recall the lesson that comes to us, again and again, across the decades: free nations must stand together to oppose tyranny,” he said.

In February this year, to mark the second anniversary of the country’s invasion, the King released a statement railing against the “indescribable aggression” Ukraine faced from Russia.

Unlike the late Queen, whose thoughts were seldom heard, Charles’ view on Russia is well known. In 2014, when he was still Prince of Wales, Charles spoke of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. In a conversation he assumed had been private, Charles said: “Now Putin is doing just about the same as Hitler.”

US Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who directed the invasion, gives the order of “Full victory, nothing else” to paratroopers in England on June 6, 1944, just before they boarded their planes for the first assault.Credit: AP

In the build-up to this year’s commemorations, a survey undertaken by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission found that nearly half of young adults in Britain do not know what D-Day is.

Only 48 per cent of people aged 18 to 34 recognised D-Day as the date that Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy, while it rose to 59 per cent when surveyed across all age groups.

One in five (21 per cent) young people said they did not know what D-Day was at all, while 12 per cent believed it was “the day that Germany surrendered to the Allied Forces unconditionally”.

The figures were hijacked this week in Britain by right-populist Nigel Farage.

But the significance of the day is not, however, lost across the channel. In the villages of Normandy, homes and main street stores flew the US, UK and Canadian flags – as well as their own – to mark the occasions.

At the top of those infamously steep cliffs – where Nazi guns and cannons sat 80 years ago – they flocked to catch a glimpse of commemorations.

Macron said France would not forget how they left their homes and risked their lives to bring freedom. He told those gathered that such ceremonies in Normandy were important as they spoke of his nation’s debt “towards those who fell, and those who survived”.

In Saint-Lo, a town near the D-Day beaches that writer Samuel Beckett described as the “capital of ruins”, Macron had paid tribute to the civilian victims of Allied bombings. He hailed the inhabitants of this “martyred city, sacrificed to liberate France”, more than 90 per cent of which was destroyed after the D-Day landings.

Macron sees the D-Day commemorations as a moment to rally members of NATO; shore up support for Ukraine; and remind the public of the human toll that preceded decades of relative peace on the continent.

Unlike the 70th anniversary festivities, where Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin had been welcomed just a few months after illegally annexing Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula, neither the Russian president nor his country’s officials were, precisely because of the protracted war.

In recent months Macron has not ruled out the possibility of sending French troops to Ukraine − a suggestion that has sparked controversy among his allies and angered Russia. French officials have been considering sending French and European military instructors to Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his wife Olena Zelenska arrive at the international ceremony at Omaha Beach.Credit: AP

The French leader pinned medals on 11 US veterans who struggled to get to their feet, inducting them into the Legion of Honour, France’s highest order of merit.

Feted everywhere they went in wheelchairs and walking with canes, the veterans used their voices to repeat the message they hope will live eternally: “Never forget”.

“We weren’t doing it for honours and awards. We were doing it to save our country,” said Anna Mae Krier, 98, who worked as a riveter building B-17 and B-29 bombers. “We ended up helping save the world.”

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.