Those young men did not die at Normandy to establish an American empire. Instead, for perhaps the only time in history, soldiers came to fight and to die to liberate others and to save a civilization from tyranny. It was an act of magnanimity, of selflessness, for which all the European victims of the Nazis ought forever to be grateful and of which all Americans ought forever to be proud.
I. The Historical Background and Context
June 6, 2024 marks the eightieth anniversary of the Allied invasion of France, an event pivotal to victory in the Second World War. The initiative required more than two years of preparation, occasioned much rancor among Allied leaders, and took place at last only because success in other theaters of war, however tenuous, made it possible.
By early 1942, the British, Russians, and Americans had forged an uneasy alliance against Germany, Italy, and Japan. The main question that confronted the Allies was whether to assign priority to the European or the Pacific theater of war. After much debate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill concluded that the greatest potential disaster for the Allies would be the collapse of the Soviet Union, which, in the early months of 1942, loomed as a distinct possibility. Preventing the loss of the USSR thus determined Allied strategy at this juncture. The Allies’ first objective in 1942 was to ensure Russian survival. Hence, the European theater and the defeat of Germany took precedence over war in the Pacific.
At the same time, the British and Americans differed about how best to fight the Nazis. Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to increase the amount of food, medicine, equipment, and armaments to the USSR. This effort worked. Despite the horrible losses that German submarines inflicted along the icy routes of the North Atlantic and the North Sea, the quantity of supplies flowing into Russia steadily increased. But Churchill and Roosevelt disagreed about where the Allies ought to concentrate their efforts. Churchill preferred to focus on the Mediterranean; in North Africa German armies were threatening Egypt and British control of the Suez Canal. He did not wish to launch an invasion of France until the Allies had amassed an overwhelming force. For the time being, Churchill argued, the Allies ought to limit their attacks on the continent to bombing raids and to encouraging resistance in occupied territories.
In disagreement not only with Churchill but also with many Americans who clamored for revenge against Japan, Roosevelt sought to relieve pressure on the Soviet Union by opening a second front in Western Europe. Hoping to boost Soviet morale at a time when it was unclear whether the USSR could endure, and to reinforce the fragile alliance between their countries, Roosevelt assured Josef Stalin that the Allies would invade Western Europe before the end of 1942. Roosevelt failed to appreciate the extent to which the Nazis still controlled the Atlantic sea lanes as 1942 drew to a close. Furthermore, although Adolf Hitler had postponed the invasion of Great Britain, the Luftwaffe continued to devastate London and the British Isles from the air, making it impossible even to consider using Britain as a base of operations.
General George C. Marshall, the U. S. Army chief of staff, objected to Churchill’s plan to concentrate on North Africa even more vigorously than Roosevelt had. The Nazis, Marshall pointed out, had already inflicted enormous casualties on the Russians. The Wehrmacht had penetrated deep into Soviet territory, reaching the outskirts of Moscow and laying siege to Leningrad and Stalingrad. Marshall urged Roosevelt and Churchill to focus on Western Europe, for the Soviets could not indefinitely withstand Hitler’s blistering onslaught. Churchill’s proposal to invade North Africa, Marshall advised Roosevelt, might serve ironically to prolong the war by enabling Hitler to defeat the Soviet Union and to consolidate his power over the whole of Europe.
Roosevelt respected Marshall’s judgment, but sobered as he was by the complications of global warfare, he abandoned plans to open a second front in France to divert German troops from the Soviet Union and to compel Germany to fight a two-front war. Like Churchill, Roosevelt had come to fear that a premature invasion of Western Europe would be disastrous for the Allied cause. He also wanted American troops to engage the Germans as soon as possible, and the best opportunity for that confrontation to take place was in North Africa. In July 1942, therefore, much to the dismay of George Marshall and Josef Stalin, the latter of whom suspected that his allies had purposely delayed opening a second front in order to allow the Nazis to weaken the Soviet Union, Roosevelt agreed to support Churchill’s proposal to attack North Africa.
Eloquent in his brevity and precision of language, General Harold Alexander informed Churchill that after a desperate struggle the Allies had prevailed when, on May 13, 1943, the last Axis troops in North Africa surrendered. Alexander wired Churchill: “Sir, It is my duty to report that the Tunisian campaign is over. All enemy resistance has ceased. We are the masters of the North African shores.” Strategically, victory in North Africa opened the Mediterranean to Allied shipping and, more important, exposed Italy, the weakest of the Axis Powers, to invasion and conquest.
Having bypassed France in favor of North Africa, Roosevelt promised Stalin a second front in Western Europe by 1943. But at a conference held in Casablanca, Morocco, Churchill again persuaded Roosevelt to delay the invasion of France. Believing that the Allies were as yet unprepared to launch such an operation, Churchill wanted to wait until 1944. Instead, over Stalin’s bitter objections, Roosevelt and Churchill decided to strike at Italy.
In July 1943, in what was among the most dubious strategic decisions of the war, the Allies undertook Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. The Allied objective was to seize the port of Messina, cross the narrow strait, and invade the Italian peninsula. On August 17, 1943, after thirty-eight days of hard fighting, Sicily was in Allied hands. But Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German commander of Italian operations, did not wish to see another German army squandered while carrying out a hopeless mission, as had happened at Stalingrad. In defiance of Hitler’s orders, he prepared to abandon Sicily. By the time Allied forces captured Messina, Kesselring had evacuated 40,000 German and 60,000 Italian troops, along with much valuable equipment. The success of this operation, a sort of Axis Dunkirk, was a ill portent for the Allied assault on Italy, which began in early September.
Once Allied troops landed on Italian soil, little about the campaign went smoothly. German troops filled the vacuum left by the Italians, whose government had surrendered on September 8, 1943. Throughout the fall of 1943 and the winter of 1944, the fighting in Italy was brutal. The Germans had secured and fortified the crucial roads and mountain passes, indefinitely stalling the Allied advance. With the sea at their backs and the German army in front of them, the Allies had no place to go. The two belligerents pounded away at each other. The Allies had little choice but to hunker down and take it, until they could fight their way through the formidable Gustav Line, which the Germans had established at Cassino. Doing so took five months, between January and May 1944. Efforts to circumvent German defenses at Anzio (Operation Shingle) between January and April 1944 also failed.
Even in victory, Allied commanders botched operations. General Mark Clark might have captured both the retreating German Tenth and Fourteenth Armies had his ego not clouded his military judgment. Fearing that his British allies intended to rob him of the fruits of victory, Clark, on May 26, 1944, ordered American troops to abandon their northward drive to cut off the German retreat and instead to proceed directly to Rome. Clark’s redeployment better served the Germans than the Allies. While elements of the Tenth and Fourteenth Armies fought an effective rearguard action in the Alban Hills south of Rome, Kesselring fell back with the main body across the Tiber River, establishing another formidable defensive position, the Gothic Line, to the north of Rome. Clark’s egotistical blunder and Kesselring’s improvisational thinking and decisive action left the Germans in a strategically advantageous position in Italy, despite having yielded a huge amount of territory to the Allies. Most of the Allied forces in Italy now faced the strong defenses of the Gothic Line, securing Hitler’s southern flank and rendering impossible an invasion of Germany from the south. The only hope now to bring the war to Germany was an invasion of France.
II. Operation Overlord
Although the Allies had long agreed in principle that they should open a second front against the Nazis in Western Europe as soon as possible, vast imperial commitments and the painful legacy of the First World War made the British more hesitant than their partners. In addition, the British had already undertaken one failed cross-channel operation and did not wish to risk another. On August 19, 1942, at the urging of Vice Admiral Louis Mountbatten, the British had launched Operation Jubilee. The plan called for the Second Canadian Infantry Division supported by fifty-eight tanks to attack Dieppe, a seaport along the English Channel in northern France.
Unfortunately, the British had failed to neutralize German defenses prior to the landing, and British spies missed German gun emplacements because the Germans had deployed their artillery under the cover of darkness. When the Canadians landed, they were at the mercy of German gunners, who raked them with artillery fire and pinned them down on the beach. British naval and air support provided inadequate cover to enable the Canadians either to advance or to retreat. Operation Jubilee cost 3,367 Canadian lives, 106 airplanes, one destroyer, and numerous landing craft. Of the lessons learned from this fiasco, the most valuable was the need to have overwhelming naval and air superiority.
The planning staff for the French campaign considered two avenues of invasion: Normandy and Pas de Calais, which was located at the narrowest point across the English Channel. They decided on the former, Normandy, determining instead, with Operation Fortitude, to use Pas de Calais as a deception. The Allies sought to convince the Germans of what many officers already wanted to believed: that the main invasion would take place at Pas de Calais and that the Normandy landings were a diversion. A landing a Pas de Calais made sense. The beaches there were level and not closed off by high cliffs, as was the case at Normandy. To convince the Germans, American intelligence created the fictitious First U. S. Army Group and broadcast false radio messages making reference to it. Allied leaders hoped to keep the Germans guessing and to reduce German anticipation of the landing at Normandy until the invasion was already underway. The ploy worked. Allied disinformation convinced the Germans that General George S. Patton was in southeastern England, preparing with the First U.S. Army Group to descend on Pas de Calais.
The Germans had long known that an Allied invasion of France was likely, even inevitable, and had been preparing to meet it since 1942. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, in command of German Army Group B, was responsible for securing coastal defenses. Rommel’s Seventh Army, composed of 130,000 men, held Normandy itself, while the Fifteenth Army defended Pas de Calais, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Unlike many of his colleagues, Rommel was convinced that the main Allied invasion would take place at Normandy and that it would have to be stopped on the beaches during the first day, which, as he said, would be the longest day for the Germans and the Allies alike.
Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the commander-in-chief of German forces in the Western theater, and General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, the commander of Panzergruppe West, disagreed with Rommel’s assessment. Rundstedt and Schweppenburg thought that the primary target of the Allied invasion was Pas de Calais, and no argument from Rommel could dissuade them. Hitler vacillated. He thought an attack on Normandy was possible, but was unwilling to dismiss the prospect of the invasion taking place at Pas de Calais. His determination to prepare for either eventuality compromised the defensive measures that Rommel had tried to put in place. Hitler, for example, deployed the majority of German armored divisions to Pas de Calais, and issued strict orders that they not be redeployed without his personal authorization. When the invasion struck Normandy, as Rommel had predicted it would, he had only the Twenty-First Panzer at his immediate disposal. It was Hitler’s refusal to listen to reason about Allied invasion that finally convinced Rommel to endorse Operation Valkyrie, the plot to assassinate him.
To prepare for the naval assault on Normandy, Operation Neptune, the Supreme Allied commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and his British deputy, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, assembled more than 7,000 ships of various kinds, which filled the harbors along the Channel coast. In addition to transporting troops and equipment, it was the primary role of the navy to destroy the German coastal batteries. With 12,000 aircraft, including 5,000 fighter planes, the Allies enjoyed air supremacy. By contrast, General Hugo Sperrie’s Third Air Fleet had only 169 planes available with which to meet the invasion.
Eisenhower had originally selected June 4, 1944 as the day on which to launch Operation Overlord, with British General Bernard Law Montgomery commanding the ground forces of the Twenty-First Army Group. The weather did not cooperate. On June 4, high winds and rough surf made a landing by air or sea impossible. Eisenhower postponed the invasion. On June 5, he made the decision to launch the campaign on June 6, even though the forecast remained uncertain. He feared that waiting any longer would compromise the readiness of the men and might reveal Allied intentions to German spies.
The first wave began shortly after midnight when 23,000 troops from three airborne divisions and glider battalions landed in France. The British Sixth Airborne Division made a good drop and moved quickly to secure its objectives: the bridges over the Orne and Dives Rivers and the Caen Canal, which the troops were to hold and later to destroy. The American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions were not so fortunate. Most missed their drop zones on the Cotentin peninsula, some by as much as five miles. Some paratroops went down in the sea while others drowned in the Vire Valley, which the Germans had flooded as a defensive measure. Members of the 101st were spread out over an area of twenty-five miles. Thousands of men wandered for days behind enemy lines, lost and disoriented, but refusing to surrender as long as their food and ammunition lasted.
The scattering of American paratroopers had one unanticipated advantage: it confused the Germans about whether the invasion was underway. To complicate matters for the Germans, Rommel was on leave in Germany to celebrate his wife’s birthday, Rundstedt had gone to bed, and Hitler, at Berchtesgaden, had taken a sleeping pill after staying up late to celebrate the marriage of Eva Braun’s sister. (Within a year, Hitler ordered the execution of the groom.) He left word that he was not to be disturbed. His military advisors thus did not present him with evidence that the invasion had begun until a noon conference on June 7, 1944, at least six hours after the first Allied soldiers had landed on the beaches of Normandy.
In the meantime, Hitler’s chief of staff, General Alfred Jodl, telephoned at Berchtesgaden, refused permission to move the Panzer Lehr Division from Pas de Calais to the beaches at Normandy without Hitler’s approval and not until daylight reconnaissance clarified the situation. As a consequence of Jodl’s decision, three German divisions, the 709th, the 716th, and the 352nd, confronted eight Allied divisions without armored support. The 709th Division defended the area in which the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions were dropping as well as Utah Beach, which the U. S. Fourth Division was attacking from the sea. The responsibilities of the 709th were daunting to say the least. The 82nd and 101st were the finest units in the American army; although scattered, their eighteen battalions were the equal of a force twice their size. The Fourth Division was also excellent, and put nine infantry divisions on Utah Beach in the first wave of the invasion. Finding themselves surrounded and outnumbered, the Germans scarcely put up a fight. The three battalions of the 709th defending Utah Beach quickly surrendered. The 23,000 Americans who landed on Utah Beach suffered only 197 casualties, the fewest of any unit on D-Day.
On Sword, Gold, and Juno Beaches, the German 716th Division confronted the British Third and Fiftieth Divisions and the Canadian Third Division. At Sword and Juno, the British and Canadian infantry, well-supported by armored divisions, got ashore easily, sustained few losses, and pressed rapidly inland. On Gold Beach, by contrast, the Fiftieth British Division had greater difficulty, with the two leading battalions, the First Hampshire and the First Dorset, suffering heavy casualties. Yet, the Fiftieth Division overcame these initial difficulties, and by nightfall on June 6 had advanced almost to Bayeux, its designated objective.
The U. S. First Infantry Division, which landed on Omaha Beach, endured the worst ordeal of any Allied unit. Opposed by the German 352nd Division, the best German force among those defending the coast of France, the First Division was cut to pieces. Geography also favored the Germans. Omaha Beach had steep banks and was bounded on either side by cliffs. These heights provided commanding positions from which to direct fire at the seaborne invaders. Moreover, the First Division lacked armored support, for the M-4 Sherman Tanks, fitted with propellers to make them capable of amphibious operation, had launched too far from shore and either foundered or sank. Had all the German divisions at Normandy been as resolute as the 352nd, the tragedy at Omaha might have been repeated on all five beaches with disastrous consequences. The majority of the 4,649 casualties that the American army suffered on D-Day occurred at Omaha Beach.
But as terrible as they were, the events that took place on Omaha were an aberration. Units landing elsewhere fared better, and even at Omaha some battalions made it ashore unscathed. Those that had suffered the worst casualties eventually regrouped and moved inland. By nightfall, all the landing sites belonged to the Allies. Approximately 156,000 Allied soldiers made it ashore on the first day alone; the expected German counterattack failed to materialize. Within one week after D-Day, by June 13, 1944, the Allies had more troops in France than did the Germans.
III. The Normandy Campaign
During the days and weeks that followed, the Allied forces that had landed on different beaches linked up their beachheads. The Americans moved up the Cotentin peninsula toward Cherbourg, while the British, under General Montgomery, made the first of several attempts to take Caen. American forces captured Cherbourg by the end of June, but the harbor there had suffered such extensive damage that it took months of repair to make it useable. The British 7th Armored Division, meanwhile, experienced in desert fighting, bogged down in the different terrain of Normandy. The Germans halted their advance at Villers-Bocage between June 12 and 14, 1944. Between June 24 and 30, Montgomery launched Operation Epsom, a second attempt to take Caen, but was again repulsed. The character of the battles for Normandy became clear in the first days of fighting. The Allies enjoyed greater numbers and resources and had also established air supremacy. But Allied troops lacked experience and, at times, their morale wavered as they slugged it out with the Germans in engagements that more nearly resembled those of the First World War. In addition, the wooded terrain, which made maneuvers difficult, favored the Germans, who were fighting on the defensive. By early July, Allied commanders became concerned that the invasion had stalled, although by then it had already cost the Allies 61,700 casualties.
Despite the apparent lack of progress, the Allies had administered 80,000 German casualties. Hitler replaced the pessimistic Gerd von Rundstedt with the more confident Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge. (Rommel was unavailable to take command, having been wounded in an air attack on July 17. Three days later, on July 20, he was implicated in the plot to assassinate Hitler and forced to commit suicide.) In a third attempt to take Caen, Montgomery launched Operation Goodwood on July 18, 1944. Attacking with three armored divisions, Montgomery’s third move against Caen failed at a cost of 6,000 Allied casualties and 400 tanks, even though Allied bombers almost completely leveled Caen itself. After Montgomery’s third failure to seize Caen, General Omar Bradley, in command of the U. S. First Army, decided the Allies needed a fresh approach. On July 25, 1944, Bradley initiated Operation Cobra in an attempt to break the stalemate.
Bradley’s initial aim was modest: to punch a hole in German defenses at their weakest point. The campaign got off to a bad start when the Americans bombed their own infantry. But the Seventh Corps under the command of Lieutenant General Joseph “Lightning Joe” Collins did manage to break through the German lines west of the village of Saint-Lô and hastened to Avranches. Collins effected the breakout that the Allies had sought in vain since the D-Day landings more than six weeks earlier.
Eisenhower determined that when the Americans had sufficient numbers operating in France, he would activate the U.S. Third Army and place it under the command of General Patton. Insisting that his troops never hold their ground and never entrench but always advance, Patton was ideally suited to take advantage of the initial success that Collins had achieved. While the British and Canadians remained bogged down around Caen, Patton’s Third Army broke into open country in what amounted to an Allied blitzkrieg. Hitler insisted on countering the American breakout at Mortain, but the effort failed. By pushing German forces deeper into the pocket separating the Allied armies, it became more likely that the Germans would trap themselves between the Third Army and the British and Canadians fighting at Caen. On August 7, 1944, in Operation Totalise, the Canadians of the Twenty-First Army Group in company with the First Polish Armored Division failed to spring this trap on the Germans when they met with stiff resistance from the Twelfth SS Panzer Division, which was also known as the Hitler Youth Division (Hitler Jugend), since its members had been recruited directly from the Nazi youth organization beginning in 1943.
On August 13, 1944, Bradley ordered Patton not to proceed north of Argentan, fearing that the Third Army might accidentally collide with the Canadians who were slowing advancing toward the village of Falaise, trying to close the circle and entrap the German army. The Canadians did not reach Falaise until August 16, and the Americans did not meet up with the Poles at Chambois until August 19. During the nine days between August 13, when Bradley halted Patton’s army, and August 21, 300,000 German soldiers and 25,000 vehicles escaped through what came to be known as the Falaise Gap, which the Twelfth SS Panzer Division held open until the First Polish Armored Division at last forced a cork into the bottle. Nevertheless, despite the time it took them to close the Falaise Gap and block the German escape route, the Allies had killed perhaps as many as 50,000 Germans and had taken at least 200,000 prisoners. At the same time, Allied bombers inflicted terrible damage, destroying more than 1,300 tanks. Of the German Panzer divisions which retreated through the Falaise Gap, none had more than fifteen tanks that were fully operational. Two Panzer divisions, the Lehr and the Ninth, now existed in name only. Fifteen German infantry divisions had also been completely wiped out.
From the middle to the end of August 1944, the Normandy campaign reached its peak. Hitler hoped to use Paris as a battleground first to halt and then to punish the advancing Allied armies. He sought to transform Paris into a French Stalingrad, but was instead compelled to abandon his plan and the city altogether. In part, this was so because, on August 15, 1944, the Allies launched a second invasion of France, not at Pas de Calais as Hitler expected, but in the south between Nice and Marseilles. Three American and five French divisions mounted Operation Anvil, quickly overcame the German Nineteenth Army, and raced up the Rhône Valley toward Grenoble. The Allied invasion of southern France made a German retreat from Paris impossible, and thus rendered any attempt to hold Paris useless if not nonsensical.
If the Germans could not keep Paris, Hitler intended to destroy it. On August 7, 1944, he had appointed General Dietrich von Choltitz the military governor of Paris. At a meeting in Germany held the following day, August 8, Hitler instructed Choltitz to be prepared to leave no Parisian religious building or historical monument standing should the city fall into Allied hands. After Choltitz arrived in Paris on August 9, Hitler confirmed the order by cable: “The city must not fall into the enemy’s hands except lying in complete rubble.” A week later, on August 16, when Choltitz had not yet carried out his order, Hitler, in a rage, screamed at him over the telephone: “Brennt Paris?” (“Is Paris burning?”)
On August 15, 1944, the Parisian police went on strike, followed on August 19 by a general insurrection that the French Communist Party had organized. The German garrison fought back, but was far too small to quell the uprising. Choltitz brokered a ceasefire with the insurgents on August 20, but many resistance groups ignored it, and a series of skirmishes continued the next day. On August 25, Choltitz bowed to the inevitable and surrendered the 17,000-man German garrison to the Free French, leaving most of the city intact and undamaged. Called the “Savior of Paris” for having prevented its destruction, Choltitz later asserted that his defiance of Hitler’s order arose from its obvious military futility, his affection for the history and culture of Paris, and his conviction that Hitler had by that time gone mad. Meanwhile, as soon as they learned the Parisians were trying to liberate themselves, Eisenhower and Montgomery, who had heretofore steadfastly opposed diverting Allied troops to Paris, were obliged now to help the insurgents.
On August 22, 1944, General Bradley transmitted orders from Eisenhower that the French Second Armored Division under the command of General Phillippe LeClerc, who was loyal to Charles De Gaulle, proceed immediately to Paris. De Gaulle, who had arrived in France unannounced and uninvited two days earlier, on August 20, 1944, made ready to follow the army. After hesitating to enter Paris in the face of stiffening German resistance, LeClerc launched a small infiltration that brought three tanks into the center of Paris at 9:30 on the evening of August 23, 1944. The rest of the division joined them on August 24, fighting all the way. On August 25, the day Choltitz surrendered the city, de Gaulle himself arrived. The remaining Nazis either yielded or fled. Paris was liberated. Costing the Allies approximately 209,672 casualties (36,976 killed; 153,475 wounded; 19,221 missing), the Normandy campaign was over. The battle to destroy the Third Reich was about to begin.
IV. A Reflection
In October 1979, about a month before my twenty-second birthday, I traveled from England, where I was a student, to Normandy. I went first to Bayeux, which I knew from my reading the British had captured one day after landing at Gold Beach. I also knew that it was from Bayeux that William, the Duke of Normandy, had set out in 1066 to conquer England. My thoughts turned to Hitler. Had Hitler managed to invade England in 1940, as William had done in 1066, I, in all likelihood, could not have come thirty-nine years later to study at an English university, to drink all the English ale that I could hold and then some, and to travel to France with my pretty English companion. But far more was at stake than my travels, my pleasures, and my education. If Hitler had conquered England, which he might have accomplished during the summer of 1940, the Nazis would have won the Second World War. I shuddered then, and I shudder now, to think how close they came to doing so.
Had the Germans won the war, had Adolf Hitler become the master of Europe, an impenetrable shadow would have fallen over civilization in the West, heralding the onset of a new barbarian Dark Age as Churchill warned. Europe would have remained shrouded in darkness for years, decades, centuries. Decimated, impoverished, and oppressed, all the peoples of Europe would have had to deal with the Germans on their terms, with only limited prospects for resistance. The same would have been true of the United States. It is, of course, unlikely that the Germans would have conquered the United States, or that Hitler would have wanted or needed to do so. But without allied partners, it is just as unlikely that the Americans could have challenged the German dominance of Europe. They, too, would have somehow to make their peace with Herr Hitler.
But it is not what might have happened in 1940 but what did happen in 1944 that matters. Although Hitler gave up his plans to invade England and launched instead the disastrous campaign against the Soviet Union, the Allies did cross the English Channel to land in Normandy, to drive the Germans out of France, and to help end their ascendancy in Europe.
While I was sightseeing and thinking about what had taken place in Normandy so many years before, my friend rented a car. We left Bayeux, driving along the coast, and came to Arromanches. On that sunny and still warm October day, we ate a splendid lunch on the terrace of a small restaurant. The breeze brought the aroma of sea salt, and after my second glass of wine, or perhaps it was my third, (I was younger then) I began to find it impossible to believe that this place had once been at the center of a terrible war–the most terrible in history. We left the restaurant, turning west onto Route Nationale 13, past the German bunkers and artillery emplacements. We stopped first at Omaha and then at Utah Beach. At Omaha, I wondered what would have happened had the Allied invasion failed, as it might have done, as many at the time, including General Eisenhower, feared and even expected it would. Would the Allies have tried again? Would Europe have ever been free of the Nazi scourge?
Our arrival at the American cemetery in St. Laurent-Colleville summoned me back to reality. The invasion did not fail. The more than 9,000 graves, that vast field of white crosses, row after row of them, proved it. Although I did not understand it then, when those Americans died on the Normandy beaches in 1944, the United States was rising to the zenith of its power. Yet, those young men did not die at Normandy to extend that power or to establish an American empire. Instead, for perhaps the only time in history, soldiers came to fight and to die to liberate others and to save a civilization from tyranny. It was an act of magnanimity, of selflessness, for which all the European victims of the Nazis ought forever to be grateful and of which all Americans ought forever to be proud.
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The featured image is a photograph of troops in an LCVP landing craft approaching “Omaha” Beach on “D-Day,” 6 June 1944, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
