What will Americans make of the grudging tone that seems to have crept into at least some of the coverage of the 75th anniversary of D-Day? It’s not just the carping about President Trump. It’s something deeper. We were just sitting down to write about it when our email lit up with a message from one of the shrewdest editors in the city. He had just finished reading the New York Times Magazine’s dirge on Scripps-Howard’s famed war correspondent, Ernie Pyle.

“I wonder,” our friend inquires in reference to the Times’ piece, “if you share my sense that little by little it turns the anniversary of D Day and a tribute to a brave reporter into an antiwar meditation arguing by indirection that no war is ever worth it.” We read it immediately and appreciated its account of how powerfully Pyle was affected by Normandy. When we got to the concluding paragraph, though, we tossed the article aside with a growl.

“Seeing and reporting the vast losses on the beach at Normandy and watching war’s meat grinder in action in the vicious battles that followed, Pyle was evidently forced to recalculate the arithmetic of victories and losses,” the Times reports in the concluding paragraph of its article. “By the time he was killed, 10 months later and on the opposite side of the world, the lesson seemed to have solidified for him.

“Not even the war ending, not even victory — which his previous reporting usually kept in sight as the great goal of the war — would be able to bring back all the people killed or counteract the damage done to the survivors. Pyle had written about battles and war in a way that promised hope. By the time victory was actually in sight, he had come to feel that there was no way the war could be a story with a happy ending.”

Forgive us for being the bearer of troubling news, but the fact is that Americans were — and still are — overjoyed at the victory our GIs, and their British, Canadian, and French allies, gained at Normandy and the rest of World War II. It’s not that anyone lacks for an appreciation of the cost in lives and fortune. It’s that they also appreciate the scale to which a defeat would have been a catastrophe. This is not undermined but rather underscored by the blunt descriptions of carnage that Ernie Pyle cabled Americans from France.

It happens that we can still remember the editorials the Times ran on June 8, 1944. None of them consisted of the hand-wringing over to which the Gray Lady has given herself. The first, headlined “The Battle of Normandy,” highlighted the fact the landings were just the beginning of an attack against the Nazi reich from all sides. It wrote of the attack that “will complete the deadly vise in which Hitler will be crushed.”

A second editorial contained a paean to the infantry. It credited many groups, including those on assembly lines at home — “all have a share in this heroic adventure,” the Times said. It focused, though, on Eisenhower’s regard for the privates who took the fight to the Germans. “Their only possible safety,” the Gray Lady said, “is to hit with all their strength, with the great variety of light and heavy weapons they now carry, but above all with their naked valor.”

Our own reading of Pyle gives us the impression that he understood that overriding glory. Though he returned to New Mexico for a break during the war, he was drawn back to battle, this time in the Pacific, where he was felled by an enemy sniper. It is hard to imagine that had he survived he’d have rued our victory. Or begrudged the way in which we commemorate the dead while celebrating the liberation of Europe for which they and their families gave their lives.

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The New York Times Magazine was the section of the Times in which the piece in respect or Ernie Pyle appeared. The section was inaccurately given in the first edition of this editorial.