Click here to subscribe today or Login.
“Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force: You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely. But this is the year 1944! The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to victory! I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory! Good luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking. — Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander on June 6, 1944.
Five beach heads. A front stretching some 60 miles. More than 7,000 ships, more than 3,000 planes. Stockpiles of 300,500 gallons of drinking water and 800,000 pints of blood plasma. Almost 160,000 troops landing in Normandy alone. More than 4,000 allied soldiers (2,500 from the United States) killed by enemy fire just trying to get from the beach landing to the German line. More than two million Allied personnel mobilized throughout “Operation Overlord.”
On the 80th anniversary, the allied D-Day invasion of Europe remains by far the largest military operation in history. And the threat to Democratic freedom motivated it all. Servicemen on the way to Normandy each got a “Pocket Guide to France” that included this:
“We democracies aren’t just doing favors in fighting for each other when history gets tough. We’re all in the same boat. Take a look around you as you move into France and you’ll see what the Nazis do to a democracy.”
The colossal logistics barely mattered to the soldiers landing on the shores. There job was to survive and move inland. Col. Paul R. Goode told the t9th Infantry Division of 175th regiment this simple version before the assault.
“You get your ass on the beach. I’ll be there waiting for you and I’ll tell you what to do. There ain’t anything in this plan that is going to go right.”
Cpl. Peter Masters of 10 Commando later put the lie to any image of heroic charges into the jaws of death.
“Nobody dashed ashore. We staggered. With one hand I carried my gun, finger on the trigger; with the other I held onto the rope-rail down the ramp, and with the third hand I carried my bicycle.”
And Col. George Taylor of the 16th Infantry Regiment told his men a stark truth about Omaha Beach.
“Two kinds of people are staying on this beach—the dead and those who are going to die.”
(It’s a line some may remember from The Longest Day, uttered in the movie by Robert Mitchum as Brig. Gen. Norman D. Cota)
Much is being written this week about remembering what they fought for, of framing current politics and the war in Ukraine with the reasons and results of D-Day. Fair enough. But we humbly suggest a simpler approach: Remember them and what they did. Four-score later, the number of people involved dwindles rapidly toward zero. To make the point, we quote Garrett M. Graff from a June 4 New York Times piece:
In 2021, Harry Parham, believed to be the last Black combat veteran of D-Day — about 2,000 Black troops landed that day — died at 99. Last July, Leon Gautier, the last surviving French commando at the Normandy landings, died. In December, it was Maureen Sweeney, the Irish weather observer whose reports of storms over the Atlantic changed the course of D-Day. In April, it was Bill Gladden, who had been part of the British Sixth Airborne Division’s glider landing on that day and had hoped, at age 100, to survive to return to Normandy, France, for Thursday’s 80th anniversary.
The fewer there are to remind us, the more important it is to remember.