Standing on the cliff at Pointe du Hoc sixty years after D-Day, I encountered a German tourist at the same spot. He stepped aside in deference to me, an obvious American, and instructed his family to do the same. I had been gazing out at the Normandy coastline while envisioning the seven thousand ships in the Allied armada that had come to liberate a continent. What this man, who was not even alive when Hitler wreaked havoc on Europe, was thinking I can only imagine. The words that came to my mind were from Ulysses Grant at Appomattox. As Robert E. Lee surrendered, Grant found himself trying to reconcile his respect for the bravery of the Confederates, including Lee, with contempt for the depraved institution that had induced them to take up arms against their own nation in the first place. It was a cause, Grant wrote, that was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
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