Grand D-Day Memorial disappoints

My wife and I took a brief trip to the Virginia mountains for a relaxing getaway and to see the fall color. Besides hiking up several peaks and visiting some historic sites, we went to the little town of Bedford, Va., about 10 miles from our lodging at Peaks of Otter on the Blue Ridge Parkway. We spent the morning touring Bedford's D-Day Memorial, which we had planned to visit on an earlier trip but ran out of time.

Although the memorial is in many ways magnificent, we came away with an empty feeling. The memorial was grand but not very informative. It was a memorial in bronze, granite and concrete rather than a museum of facts and wonderment. It consumes dozens of acres of land on a knoll just outside Bedford, a town that suffered more D-Day casualties per capita than any other American town or city.

A combination of human grief and civic boosterism, along with the determination of one D-Day survivor from Bedford, made the $25 million memorial happen. Although I admired the scope and magnificence of the memorial, I wondered whether the investment would pay off for Bedford. Most of the people in our one-hour guided tour were military veterans (like me) and their spouses. School groups come to the memorial, but what do children born in the 21st century know or care about D-Day? It's ancient history. Sadly, they won't learn a great deal from the Bedford memorial.

The memorial includes some magnificent statuary depicting soldiers battling their way ashore on June 6, 1944, and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the commander of the liberating armies. Perhaps the grimaces on the faces of the soldiers can inspire young visitors to learn more about World War II, but watching the first few minutes of the movie "Saving Private Ryan" would show them more than the statuary at Bedford does.

D-Day remains a touchstone of American military history. It is honored with every passing June, although the veterans who waded ashore that day are almost all departed. It was the largest amphibious landing in history and will probably never be exceeded because today's military tactics and strategies would make such a landing unnecessary. D-Day helped hasten the end of World War II and rid Europe of the Nazi scourge, but it directly impacted only one part of a global war. The war in Europe would continue for another year. The war in the Pacific lasted another 15 months. German losses on the Eastern Front, as any Russian will tell you, had already made the fall of the Third Reich inevitable. Russia lost 20 million soldiers and civilians in the war.

We extol the D-Day anniversary far more than we honor the Pearl Harbor bombing, the battle of Midway, the North African, Sicilian, Italian and southern France victories or VE Day or VJ Day.

Bedford has a claim of honor for its casualties on D-Day, but those casualties do not come to life in the way casualties on actual battlefields do. I have been far more moved by visiting Gettysburg, Antietam, Manassas and other battlegrounds. The Bedford memorial has some similarities to the expansive World War II Memorial on the Washington Mall, which has little of the tear-choking emotions of the simple honors of the Vietnam War Memorial.

I would not tell anyone to not go to the Bedford memorial. It's worth seeing, but it lacks the impact of, for example, the Appomattox battleground a few miles away, where 30,000 bedraggled Confederate soldiers surrendered, ending a war that took 600,000 American lives and changed America forever.