D-Day: So Important, So Long Ago

Today was the longest day. Sixty-five years ago. It was supposed to be the fourth of June—and the Germans were ready for us. We tried again on the fifth—and the Germans were still ready. On the sixth they all stood down, the weather was too bad. We had better weather reports—we slipped in through a few short hours lull in the storm.
Rommel had even taken a vacation—he wasn’t near the beach. Hitler was napping—no one dared to wake him to get him to free up the panzers for a counterattack. The Russians were doing their bit by holding down two-thirds or more of the German Army, which they did for the whole war.
Even so it was a close thing. By late afternoon the Allied high command was seriously considering pulling all the troops off the beach and calling it a failure. Ike had a speech in his pocket in which he admitted to defeat and took all the blame.
We won through—and on to Paris, the Rhine, all the way to the Elbe and southeast as far as Prague. It was the last war we won (unless you count the invasion of Granada). Even it had its political detractors. Eisenhower was accused of being a communist stooge because he didn’t go all the way to Berlin.
Oh my. Ike was clever enough to realize that when you have two armies (Russian and American) rolling hell for leather straight at each other, shooting at anything that moves, it is very, very tricky to keep them from accidentally shooting each other to pieces.
So he and the Russian high command picked a nice big river for both armies to stop at. “When you see lots and lots of water, don’t shoot at ANYTHING on the other side.” That’s an order the dumbest private can understand.
It wasn’t a communist plot; it was a sane effort on both sides to keep World War III from breaking out before World War II was over. And it was a wonderful victory. It was followed in four months by an equally important surrender in the Pacific. We were ecstatic.
My daddy, my wife’s daddy and a few uncles and two of my older cousins were coming home! No more yellow stars on living room windows to tell the passerby some boy who lived here would not be back home forever more. The rows of white crosses would not continue to grow.
That Victory in Europe (VE Day) all started on the beaches of Normandy. Had the invasion failed, we would live in an unrecognizably different world. Would the Russians have driven all the way to Paris? Would the “Soviet Block” have included every country in NATO but Italy and Britain?
D-Day HAD to succeed. There’s an outside chance that failure might have led to some sort of negotiated peace with Germany—if only to keep the Russians out of western Europe. (The Germans had played that role for over a thousand years—it would have been nothing new to them.)
Then the Nazis might have stayed in power; the death camps might have gone on killing. Can you imagine NATO with Nazi Germany as a member? Had D-Day failed, it might possibly have happened. We owe a lot to the young English, Scotch, French, American, Polish, Canadian, and Northern Irish troops who bled and died to create the world we live in today.
We call it the “good war”, but to the boys who fought it, it was as terrifying, brutish and deadly as any other war. If you asked an American boy what he was fighting for he was liable to say, “A piece of mom’s apple pie.”
The men on the front were no more epic, noble or committed to a glorious cause (democracy, the four freedoms?) then front line troops in almost any war. It was a frightening, exhausting, dangerous job, and they did it well enough to win it. We owe them.
They had the awesome resources of American industry behind them. A storm came up about three weeks after D-Day. It destroyed so much American equipment that, as Churchill points out, had any other participant in World War II lost so much material in a single day, they would have forced to sue for peace immediately.
We didn’t miss a step. Our factories supplied the boys on D-Day, in Italy and the Philippines, the British, the Russians, the Free French, all of the underground operations, the Chinese and anyone else who had a rifle pointed at Japan or Germany. For the whole war.
When we broke out of the D-Day beach head in July, German officers watched in awe and envy as the masses of American bombers flew in support of unending quantities of American tanks, trucks and jeeps. They had never begun to have such resources. Not ever.
The boys who fought at D-Day are old men today. They and the other veterans of our last “good, victorious war” are dying at the rate of a thousand a day. In not long there will be as few of them as the tiny group of Civil War veterans I remember seeing as a boy.
The factories that won World War II are falling down, too. One of the biggest foundries in this area now has a retail mall sitting where it once stood. The railroad tracks in downtown Muskegon still run along the lakeshore where dozens of foundries stood, making engine blocks for tanks, and trucks. They are all gone.
(I sometimes wonder: if we ever again get into a war where huge amounts of trucks and tanks are needed, are we going to import them from Japan and China? Not to worry? Penske has bought up the distribution—NOT the manufacturing capabilities, they’ll go to someone else—chain for Saturn. Perhaps Renault will build them. In a war, no doubt France would be delighted to go on shipping us trucks and military vehicles. We hope.)
But for today, we can celebrate one of our last unambiguous victories. The old men and the young president gather before row upon row of white crosses. For many it may be their last salute. So salute them back—we owe them.