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They were the e: D-Day soldiers help UNO open archives
By ELIZABETH MULLENER
Staff writer
Stephen Ambrose thinks that D-Day was the single most decisive event of the 20th century. That?s the day ? June 6, 1944 ? that the allied forces of the United States, England and Canada invaded the beaches of Normandy and marked the beginning of the end of World War II.
?It was such an inspiring thing,? said Ambrose, best-selling author and professor of history at the University of New Orleans.
To memorialize that event, and to document it, Ambrose several years ago established the Eisenhower Center for Leadership Studies at UNO. On Friday, the center will celebrate its grand opening in new quarters on the UNO lakefront campus.
The center, which has collected 500 oral histories from veterans of D-Day, also houses maps, photographs and artifacts of the battle, all of which will be accessible to the public at an open house from 1 to 3:30 p.m.. At 3:30, Ambrose will speak about Dwight D. Eisenhower, mastermind of the invasion and subject of a two-volume biography by Ambrose. And at 4:15, three of the principal participants of D-Day will recount their experiences. They are Jim Wallwork, who flew the glider that launched the invasion; Hans von Luck, whose German unit met the attack; and John Howard, who commanded a company of the British air force. All events are free and open to the public.
Stephen Ambrose
D-Day 'such an inspiring thing'
?My thought in organizing the center,? Ambrose said, ?was how wonderful it would be if we could listen to the veterans of the Battle of Gettysburg describing their experiences. But they didn?t have the technology. So I wanted to do something to pay back the people who collected Civil War diaries and letters and put them into archives and made it possible for me, 100 years later, to study the Civil War.
?And I want to make it possible for the scholars and students of the 21st century to study World War II. I want to make my contribution, and I?m doing it this way.?
See UNO, B-4
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1 Sunday, April 16, 1989 The Times-Picayune
UNO ^
From B-1
Ambrose, who specializes in military history at UNO, says that his average undergraduate student has heard of D-Day but has a fuzzy perception of what it was all about.
?They?ve heard of Ike, Roosevelt, Churchill,? he said, ?and they think of those guys as I heroes. They watch a lot of TV | and they?ve seen a lot of World War II movies. They?re aware of it ? more aware than they are of Vietnam.
?Vietnam was the damnedest war,? he said. ?We came out of Vietnam with no heroes. This has never happened before.
?The Civil War produced heroes on both sides who are still revered today. Do you know any white Southern boys who don?t revere Lee or Jackson? And World War I ? everybody knows Black Jack Pershing and Sergeant York. In World War II, everybody knows Audie Murphy, Ike, Patton, Douglas MacArthur.
?But you ask people who are the heroes of Vietnam, and you?re going to get silence.?
In fact, Ambrose said, his students feel deprived by the scarcity of modern-day heroes in their lives.
?I think they feel a strong tinge of jealousy,? he said, ?that these guys got to participate in I great events ? great events in ' which the issues were clear-cut, right and wrong were obvious. The men who gave their lives on D-Day gave their lives for a purpose that the young men and women of today can identify with.
?They?ve got this vague sense that those who died in Vietnam
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?	what the hell did they die for? They don?t have those questions about World War II. The feeling I get from them is, God, I wish I was there, I wish I?d been born earlier. It was such a wonderful war, if you lived.?
Ambrose recounts a time when Hans von Luck described for some students a wartime romance of his.
?Her name was Dagmar,? Ambrose said, ?and he and Dagmar took one look at each other and wanted to get married right then.
?There was such a sense then that everything was on the line, everything moved so fast. People were so aware that this meeting might be their last meeting and so they had to pour everything into the moment. That?s almost unique in human affairs ? that sense of living completely in the moment.
?And as Hans told that story, one of the young girls, her face just lit up and she said, ?God. I can?t wait till the next war.? ?