Seventy years ago, on June the 6th 1944, the tide of the Second World War was about to turn. The allied invasion known as D-day started on the beaches of France and advanced all the way to Berlin where the Germans surrendered eleven months later. The war in Europe was over.
It was a clever and well planned campaign, but its success or otherwise was never a foregone conclusion. The Germans were aware that it was to happen, but wrongly assumed the enemy forces would land at Pas de Calais, which was just 45 km from the British coast. Rommel and his men encamped there and Allied bombers kept shelling the area as though preparing it for an invasion. False radar reports were issued to confirm this destination and dummy landing craft and rubber tanks were assembled to complete the illusion.
In the event the troops took the circuitous route to Normandy and landed at a beach the Americans would call Omaha. The weather was atrocious; convincing the German’s that the event would be postponed. Rommel even went back home to celebrate his wife’s birthday. 150,000 men landed on that June dawn, mostly American and British, but also Canadians, French, Polish and Dutch and although by the end of the day thousands would be dead, they succeeded in establishing a beachhead and the rest, as they say, is history.
The logistics needed to mount the invasion were monumental. Across the channel from the landing points England had been turned into a huge armed camp. 163 new airfields, 2 million tons of supplies, 1500 tanks and 5000 boats. The Luftwaffe’s 183 fighter planes that day faced 11,000 Allied aircraft.
D-day had been promised to Stalin as early as 1942. His country was under an interminable siege from Germany’s eastern front. By mid 1942 more than 150 German divisions had overrun the Soviet Union to a depth of 1500 km, and the casualties were horrendous. However President Roosevelt wisely decided that America and Britain were not ready in 1942 or even 1943. To placate Stalin he offered American lend-lease aid which eventually caused Stalin to fulminate that the war was being fought with American money and American machines, but with Russian lives.
There was more than a grain of truth in this claim. For every American who gave his life in World War II, some 59 Russians died. This is not to deny the American lives lost. Over 400,000 Americans perished, but Roosevelt’s shrewd delaying of the D-day assault meant the Allies won the war and America won the peace.
Americans then assumed the role of peacekeeper. They saw themselves as the ones who rode to the rescue, vanquished the enemy, got hailed as liberators, reinstated democracy as they envisaged it and then went home, certain they had left the place better than they had found it.
The vision is now fading and the well-intentioned Americans are confused. The memory of D-day has provided seventy years of inspiration, but the jubilant people of Paris have long since vanished; replaced by divided Koreans, victorious Viet-Cong, disillusioned Iraqis, dazed Afghanis and fuming Syrians. The US will have found that might, once expressed as “shock and awe”, is no match against ideology.
In the meantime on the home front the money has all gone, wiped out in an economy brought to its knees by a corrupt banking system that eventually morphed into the global financial crisis that is still unresolved. America’s ability to ride to the rescue is now constrained by cost overruns.
Their lame-duck president looks timid as he procrastinates over Iran, fails to act when the Syrian regime oversteps a red line that he himself had set and watches helplessly as the Ukraine stumbles from crisis to crisis. His military strategy relies on drones that indiscriminately assassinate all in their wake and as a result the democracy that once boasted a justice system that demanded a fair trial before retribution now seems irreparably compromised.
Even post-war America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, was far from perfect. They had few civil rights for a sizable segment of the population, they were about to usher in the despicable McCarthy era and their top law enforcement officer was found to have a surprising number of skeletons in his closet apparently alongside his own covert wardrobe of women’s clothing.
But they proceeded to fly us to the moon and made huge strides in the field of medical science and technology. After the war America’s enlightened Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe and Franklin Roosevelt’s wily management of D-day meant Americans emerged as the saviours of humanity. They were given the mantle of international leadership and thus for a time became a repository for the invested wealth of the world.
History records however that it was the Russians who largely paid the price; perhaps they are now demanding their moment in the sun.
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