Lessons From D-Day

By the time you read this, sixty-five years ago today, we had finally secured a tiny beachhead on the shores of Western Europe. We would be pinned down there for six more weeks before we could break out into central France.
The first thing Americans should realize about D-Day—and all of World War II—was that it was a joint effort. Our major contribution to the entire war was industrial. Not in the least to insult the gallant men and boys who fought and died, but it would be very fair to say that Rosie the Riveter did more to win that war for us than all the GIs in uniform.
Russians rode American tanks all the way to Berlin. They fired American weapons and ate American Spam. (They thought it was wonderful stuff.) They lost twenty million dead and held down most of the German army, but their heart’s blood flowed north in an endless line of American trucks from the southern coast of Iran.
Those truckers—by keeping Russia in the fight—did as much to win World War II as any military unit. As did the naval convoys around the coast of Norway, braving Arctic storms, German torpedoes and aerial bombs that also poured supplies into Russia.
British and French troops who fled the continent after Dunkirk, four years before D-Day, were immediately rearmed with American rifles and cannon. As Churchill put it, without the American supplies the British would have been forced to use empty beer bottles to repulse German invaders during the Blitz.
(After his marvelous speech, “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender”, Churchill put his hand over the microphone and said, “We shall hit them over the head with beer bottles as they crawl ashore. We’ve nothing else to work with.”)
Even Tito relied on American supplies air dropped into Yugoslavia where the Serb partisans were engaged in desperate war against a huge German army augmented by Bosnian Waffen SS. American cargo planes regularly landed on empty fields in occupied France bringing in munitions for the underground resistance.
A huge fleet of American cargo planes flew guns, ammunition and supplies over the Burma mountains to keep the beleaguered Chinese in the war against Japan. Philippino guerillas got their supplies with stickers promising that “I shall return”.
We had begun preparing our fleet for World War ten years before D-Day. Long before war was declared a vast American naval umbrella covered most of the Atlantic, firing on German U-boats that tried to stop supplies from reaching England. (Hitler, not daring to shoot back, stuck strictly to the laws of neutrality —and we had a free pass until Pearl Harbor.)
(It was an American coast guard cutter on a “routine” mission near the English Channel that sighted the German battleship Bismarck and notified the British of its location so that they could sink it.)
Our factories won that war. A Japanese industrialist got hold of some pirated figures on American ship building in April, 1942—only five months after Pearl Harbor, before Corregidor surrendered in the Philippines—and he was so stunned at the scale of American production he immediately began planning for life after the war in a defeated Japan.
Rosie the Riveter should have been standing on the Normandy shore with President Obama. She must be in her eighties now, too. Has anybody made an effort to track the number of veterans who manned our factories, how many are still alive, how many die each year?
They made it possible to fight a very smart war with relatively few casualties and no damage at home. We paid other people to do most of the dying. The British lost millions; the Russians lost tens of millions, the Chinese had huge losses. We lost barely a third of a million.
As late as August, 1944—three months after D-Day—the British Empire had more men fighting the Axis than we did. England took her money and built new factories all over the Depression wracked United States because we were out of bombing range.
We dominated the planet with those British-built factories for decades after the war. No nation in recorded history has enjoyed such a preponderance of power as we did in the 1940s, ‘50s’ and ‘60s. That power, wealth and rank came out of World War II.
By contrast, Britain was bankrupt, unable to hang on to her empire. The French could only helplessly watch their Empire drift away. Holland lost her empire. The Russians were ruined (imagine the US with everything burned down east of the Mississippi), China was too weak to withstand the Communists, Belgium’s empire slid away—only America stood tall, powerful and rich.
That glorious American future all turned on D-Day. The men on the beaches—and the men and women who built their munitions—won a future for their nation no Roman Emperor or British King could ever have imagined.
D-Day was the hinge upon which the door of the future turned. It is fitting that the American president who faces the next door to the future was in Normandy on the Sixty-fifth anniversary of the last one.
He faces a world in which we must do our own bleeding and dying—increasingly alone and without reliable allies. Our industry is moving off-shore so rapidly we cannot count the losses. We couldn’t “do” another World War II.
Salute the old; look forward to the new. Understand what created the old; try to see what we can do wisely in the new—leaning on our comprehension of the past. For the first time in sixty-five years we actually NEED other people.
We do need a little help from our friends. We first may need to MAKE some friends. Buy them, flatter them, whatever it may require. D-Day might actually a very good moment for introspection. If we got to know ourselves, what we do well, what we don’t do well—this would be the best lesson we could learn from that glorious day so long ago.