D-Day, ironically, was re-enacted in Ireland in 1997 on the Wexford beaches, with Irish Army extras supplying Allied and German troops for the Steven Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan, writes Martin Mansergh.
The 60th anniversary of D-Day will be celebrated more enthusiastically by the victorious Allies than by the successors of those who were defeated or whose governments were neutral. It is the last anniversary in which fit survivors in numbers will be able to participate and is another opportunity to sort out mixed feelings on the subject.
One advantage of a greater distance in time is the opportunity for transcending conflict, and appreciating the positive values in different positions. It is utterly unnecessary to denigrate Irish neutrality because one admires the Allied war effort and sacrifices. Most Irish people who participated on the British side supported Irish neutrality.
It is equally unnecessary for those who are proud of Irish neutrality to denigrate those who took an active part in the war. The fight against fascism in Spain is regarded as honourable; why not also the fight against Nazism?
Many of us have family members who lived through the Emergency, diversified their farms, joined the LDF and had their letters to relatives in Britain censored.
D-Day was the beginning of the end, where the Battle of Britain had been the end of the beginning. It was the prelude to the liberation of western Europe, and established an American hegemony to this day.
History is illuminated by personal stories and tragedies. A couple of years ago, we visited an Allied war cemetery in Bayeux with a map to pick out the grave of my wife Liz's uncle. He was a doctor killed in an air crash in poor visibility in July 1944.
A French woman, Anne-Marie Harris, had a whirlwind romance and marriage with an officer in the British army from a Tipperary family, Gen Sir Ian Harris - subsequently the last GOC in Northern Ireland before the Troubles - and will be revisiting with a group her native Normandy.
Of course, the second World War was not just a moral crusade. Indeed, wars presented as such often end in disaster. Every possible attempt was made to avoid war, with even the Americans brought in only by Pearl Harbour and Hitler's foolish declaration of war.
The serial annexation of weaker countries against their consent is not tolerable or consistent with any kind of civilisation or stability. Collective security had failed. So had appeasement, which Ireland supported and benefited from.
The wartime generation in Britain, while mostly hostile to communism, nonetheless admired the Soviet defence of the fatherland, and had a kinder view of Stalin, though his crimes were nearly as terrible as those of Hitler's.
The second World War ended unfortunately by subjecting the countries of central and eastern Europe to a Soviet-style despotism for a generation.
The maintenance of Irish neutrality against extraordinary pressures and keeping a nearly defenceless State largely free of the horrors of war were a political and diplomatic achievement that reflected enormous credit on the political skill and backbone of Eamon de Valera and those who worked with him.
Participation in the war would have been deeply divisive, and the strict censorship, though irksome, was probably necessary. Republicans who deeply resent his harsh attitude to the IRA tend to overlook the fact that the very life of the State was at stake.
Irish unity, as opposed to a British willingness to support the principle in 1940, was not on offer. As my father noted after the war, much of the tension in Anglo-Irish relations stemmed from disputed status.
For Irish people, the State was to all intents and purposes a republic. For Churchill, it was still the half-formed dominion of the Treaty.
He won the first round against de Valera in 1922, but deeply resented de Valera's success in dismantling the Treaty and recovering the ports, compounded by neutrality.
Yet arguably, a neutral Ireland, even without the ports, was of greater benefit to the Allies than an additional front that required to be defended.
Moreover, Northern Ireland provided bases. There was a price to be paid post-war in terms of diplomatic isolation and a more entrenched partition.
J.P. Duggan's interesting book on the German ambassador Hempel, who reinforced the credibility of Irish neutrality in Berlin as much as the American envoy, David Gray, tried to undermine it in Washington, shows that de Valera's visit of condolence on the death of Hitler fell flat as Hempel was devastated and humiliated, not only by total defeat, but by Hitler's suicide.
The Nazi racial ideology would have been absurd if it had not been so evil and tragic in its consequences.
My distant German cousin Vita von Wedel, an art critic on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, sent me a female relative's ancestral pass of 1938, stamped with eagle and swastika, which lists her Irish forebears, including great-grandmother Catherine Mansergh.
The pass contains the following explanation: "The belief, deeply rooted in national socialist thinking, that it is the highest duty of a people to keep its race and its blood clean of foreign influences, and to eradicate foreign blood intrusions, is grounded in the scientific knowledge of heredity and race research."
Christabel Bielenberg, who died in Carlow last year, was a woman of great courage and humanity. She was, along with her husband, on the fringe of the July plotters, many of whom were executed.
When I was in Bonn in the mid-1970s, I met the genial and somewhat musical Hans Becker, who lived in Galway and was nicknamed the "Gauleiter of Connemara".
The vindictiveness in some quarters towards Francis Stuart is not justified. We were with friends of my wife in Marburg for the doctor's 80th birthday, in which he reminisced and sang with old comrades from his his time as a naval doctor in Brest.
Not all Germans, or even most of them, were criminal. The regime was.
A rebuilt democratic Germany has made a huge contribution to Europe since.