Bush finds a common bond on tour of D-Day beaches

President George Bush and an invading army of security men, including a flotilla of covering warships offshore, brought the bandwagon of the president's European tour to the D-Day beaches yesterday.

In truth, President Bush never stepped onto the shore. He flew over the Norman coast in a helicopter, while the warships scanned the skies for intruders. Security, for a president fighting a war against terrorism, would have been impossible on the miles of white sand of the Omaha or Utah beaches.

Instead, he gave an eloquent and mostly well-judged short speech in pouring rain at the American war cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, in which he linked 6 June 1944 to 11 September 2001.

The sacrifice made by allied soldiers on the invasion beaches was the same sacrifice demanded of young people of many nations fighting the terrorist threat to freedom and democracy today, he said. "Our security is still bound up together in a transatlantic alliance, with soldiers in many uniforms defending the world from terrorism at this very hour."

The opportunity for false notes, and the ungainly stretching of political points, was large. President Bush and his speechwriter brought it off reasonably well.

This was no Gettysburg address, although at times his words consciously echoed Abraham Lincoln's celebrated civil war cemetery speech.

Nor was it simply a photo-opportunity with gravestones – although the President was choreographed to walk slowly through the lines of white crosses to the lectern for the sake of the breakfast-time television cameras in the United States.

With American and French flags crossed in front of each grave, and a security man behind each tree, President Bush said: "The day will come when no one is left who knew them, when no visitor to this cemetery can stand before a grave remembering a face and a voice.

"The day will never come when America forgets them. And our nation and the world will always remember what they did here, and what they gave here for the future of humanity."

The timing of President Bush's visit to Europe more or less demanded a detour to Normandy. Yesterday was Memorial Day in the US, a public holiday and the equivalent of Remembrance Day in Britain.

No US head of state has ever been outside America on Memorial Day for the traditional presidential address before.

By going to the beautiful, pine-fringed Colleville cemetery, overlooking Omaha beach, and standing amongst its 9,387 American, west-facing graves, President Bush was, in a sense, returning to the US. The land for the graveyard was ceded "in perpetuity" by France to the American people.

There was a risk, nonetheless, that Mr Bush, no great orator, would milk the emotion of 1944 – freshly churned by movies and television programmes, like Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers – for immediate political gain.

Could the war against the evil of Nazism be compared to Mr Bush's war of "good against evil", declared in the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks on the US? Would the President sound as if he was accusing the French and other European allies (though hardly the Germans) of failing to pay back their debt from 58 years ago?

Some passages of Mr Bush's speech were clearly intended to rouse emotion in America (such as the reference to the mother who asked for her son's Bible to be buried instead of his body, which was never found). But it also found words to re- assert the common bond, and shared history and values, between Europe and the US.

Some of the more strident language used by Mr Bush in the US was set aside. He also omitted any reference to accusations made by conservative US commentators that Europe is slackening in the fight against terror and that France is anti-American and anti-semitic.

Mr Bush used his address to remind Americans that Europeans had already done a great deal post-11 September, and to remind Europeans that – whatever the sharp differences across the Atlantic on other issues – they owed their liberties partly to American sacrifices.

"For some military families in America and Europe, the grief is recent, with the losses we have suffered in Afghanistan," he said.

"They can know, however, that the cause is just and, like other generations, these sacrifices have spared many others from tyranny and sorrow."

After the speech, President Bush and President Jacques Chirac placed huge wreaths in the shape and colour of their national flags in the memorial colonnade at the cemetery.

Earlier, the two presidents and their wives had attended a short church service at Sainte-Mère-L'Eglise, the village a little to the west captured by US paratroopers in the early hours of D-Day.

In a brief speech, Mr Chirac said that France and the US stood together in the war against "terrorist barbarism". "Whenever essential values are at stake, you can count on us, as we know that we can count on you," the French President said.

Although yesterday's events concentrated on the two American invasion beaches, President Bush also referred in his speech to the courage and sacrifices of the British, Canadian, French and other allied soldiers who stormed the three other beaches – Juno, Gold and Sword.

It is worth, however, correcting a mistake repeated over and over by the French media yesterday. Sainte-Mère-L'Eglise was not the first French village to be liberated in June 1944. British glider and paratroops landed earlier to capture Pegasus Bridge over the Caen canal near Benouville, 60 miles to the east.

Although security was tight in Sainte-Mère-L'Eglise, several hundred local people lined the streets for several hours in the rain, chanting "Chirac" and "George Bush" and waving US and French flags.

One elderly man complained that the anti-capitalist, anti-globalist and pacifist demonstrations against Mr Bush in Paris and Caen on Sunday – and a new protest in Caen yesterday – were "completely misplaced".

"There may be disputes with the Americans today. That is normal. But these protesters forget what these young Americans did for us in 1944," he said.