Absent friends

As the Atlantic alliance falters, recalling the Normandy landings is all the more poignant

On 6 June 1944 Private Francis McKinney from North Carolina stepped off the Castletown dock, in Portland, Dorset. With four crew mates, he boarded an amphibious Sherman tank alongside 34 other armoured vehicles assigned to support the 1st Infantry Division on Omaha beach. Shortly before McKinney reached Normandy his, and 26 other tanks, were overwhelmed by the waves. The 21-year-old former farmworker drowned with his crew mates. Their bodies were never found.

They were among the 2,510 US servicemen who paid the ultimate price on D-Day. In all 407,316 US troops died during World War Two in arguably the greatest international act of selflessness in human history.

I learned the North Carolinian’s story at Portland’s D-Day Museum – which engaged my seven-year old daughter, and moved me deeply. It is housed on the dock side from which McKinney set sail and celebrates the 73,000 US soldiers who passed though Weymouth and Portland to invade France.

Visitors are encouraged to handle the exhibits, climb into vehicles, and feel the heft of real (if deactivated) weapons. On display is a Spitfire, a Bofors 40mm field gun, a Sherman tank and much besides. It provides as authentic a flavour of 1944’s extraordinary effort as you are likely to find. The volunteer staff were among the friendliest and best-informed I have met.

Picking up a Thompson sub-machine guns, bazookas and combat food containers was all the more resonant in a week when the US presidency signalled arguably the most significant pivot in international policy since the US entered World War Two. Of course, you can never quite tell with Donald Trump, consistency is not his hallmark. Interventions by him and vice president JD Vance, however, are of one trajectory. The era of the US underwriting European security is over.

The significance of such a change of course can hardly be overstated. During the Cold War, the US stationed more than quarter of a million troops in Europe, and as late as the 1990s, almost any journey between West German towns passed an American army base. America as the guarantor of European freedom has endured for 83 years – significantly longer than the Soviet Union itself. The end of that relationship marks a pivot whose magnitude equals 1990’s collapse of the Iron Curtain, or the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Trump’s is within his rights to hang up America’s sherif badge of course, and perhaps Europe’s confrontation of uncomfortable truths is overdue?

But that prospect makes Portland’s evocation of its D-Day role the more poignant. No memorial does real justice to those who died driving fascism from Europe. Portland’s museum, however, is an inspiring primer on their methods, and a fitting celebration of Private McKinney and all the others who sacrificed everything. But it is also a reminder of the sheer scale of US support for the allies, and the resulting world order. If Trump continues on the course to which he has committed, this dockside attraction will also stand as memorial to the end of something far, far greater.

We paid £19 for an adult and a child, and were there for approximately an hour.