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As the tale of Slapton Sands reminds us, it wasn’t only the men who went ashore on June 6, 1944 whose sacrifices are worth remembering, but rather all those who risked their lives at all points before and after, so that the war effort could succeed.

Canadians and Americans rightly mourn the fighting men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But our modern wars scarcely allow us to comprehend the wholesale death toll that struck the West’s “greatest generation” (as Tom Brokaw put it). Consider: The 946 servicemen who died in Exercise Tiger, a training mission, were more numerous than the total casualties in Afghanistan, for all coalition nations combined, in all of 2010 or 2011. Yet by the standards of 1944, that death toll was seen as a rounding error. Incredibly, in fact, the whole operation was kept secret at the time, and has remained obscure ever since — despite the appalling loss of more than 300 men to friendly fire. Compare that to the modern era, in which the friendly-fire killing of four Canadian soldiers by an American pilot near Kandahar in 2002 comprised a significant, exhaustively investigated military scandal.

Warfare itself has changed greatly since 1944 — especially in the field of weaponry. Aerial drones and guided missiles were the stuff of science-fiction comics 68 years ago. Now, they are a regular part of the Western military arsenal (as al-Qaeda’s second-in-command and his retinue discovered this week). As a result, the art of war is less deadly (for our side, at least) by orders of magnitude. When Western soldiers lose soldiers on the battlefield, we now are able to report on these fallen heroes individually, by name — as opposed to the anonymous round-numbers that filled the front pages during WWII. In the air force and navy, whole years (and even wars) can go by without a single service member dying in combat.

Though the the sheer scale of the sacrifice made by the generation of Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen that fought and won World War II is difficult for members of today’s relatively pampered generation to appreciate, we must do our best to try. And if not on June 6, then when?

National Post

jkay@nationalpost.com

— Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.