Remembering Why We Fought D-Day


By Bruce Walker Friday, June 5, 2009
Sixty-five years ago, on June 6, 1944, the Allied Powers made a desperate gamble for victory. Nazi Germany could not have been defeated without an invasion of northern France. Allied forces in Italy were trapped on Anzio “The Shingle”or in rough mountain fighting in southern Italy. The air war over Europe was going well, very well, but it would never be enough to force fanatical Nazis to surrender.
What about the Red Army? Its great victory over the German Army came two months after D-Day, in the destruction of Army Group Center. The Germans had no reserves to that mass attack because, for the first time and because of the diversion of many divisions to the West (as well as the near annihilation of the Luftwaffe by Allied air forces), the Germans could not launch a counter-attack to slow or to stop the Red Army advance. The typical historical fable is that there were so many more Russians than Germans that Russian victory was inevitable. Actually, when the occupied territories were considered, the Russians and Germans were roughly equal in number. D-Day, and all the Allied effort surrounding D-Day, insured that Hitler lost the war.

Why was utterly defeating Hitler, rather than just stopping Hitler, necessary? Total victory over the Nazis was necessary because we – Americans, Britons, Canadians, and the rest – were the good guys, and because Hitler and his Nazis, as nearly as anything we had seen, were the very, very bad guys. If we had not fought for total victory sixty-five years ago, the Nazis could easily be ruling Europe today. That is a scary enough thought, but this is an even scarier thought: tens of millions of Americans, in 2009, would have spoken of our Crusade in Europe the same way that President Obama talks today about the crusades of Medieval Europe. The greatest moral question of our age is from the realm of counter-factual history: If some pleasant sounding descendent of the Nazis was the practical overlord of Europe today, which Americans would say “We cannot compromise with evil!” and which Americans would say “We must view the world as it is, and we must see all viewpoints.”

If the Nazi regime survived, the death camps would never have been overrun. If the Nazi regime survived, many Americans today would have wondered what in the world men like Churchill were thinking about in opposing Hitler. The same is true if noxious and murderous regimes like in Iran and in North Korea bluster and cow us. The same is true if we make moral equivalences between Israel, fighting for the right to live in peace with neighbors who hate it, and homicide bombers or modern Hitlers who would made Tel Aviv radioactive dust, whatever the ultimate price in human blood.

We must make today the same decision that our countrymen made sixty-five years ago, when they entered a murderous battlefield whose slaughtering per minute even exceeded the unthinkable rates of mayhem and murder at the Somme in 1916: Shall we let great, militant, evil survive or shall we end that evil at enormous costs to ourselves? Trying to pander to the anti-Semitism of those who hate Israel or the anti-Americanism of those who consider our nation the “Great Satan” is not fighting evil. It is trying to win over evil. That always fails.

Will we take the easy course of peace with evil today and let our children and grandchildren be left with the task of confronting a stronger evil at some later time? The question is not intellectual but moral. The choice, likewise, is not intellectual but moral. Allied soldiers who died on Normandy knew that if they did not fight in 1944, there grandchildren would pay the price of the reluctance for sacrifice.

Selfish men and cowards always like to make hard choices into complicated choices. Vain leaders, like Obama, prefer to pretend that great moral issues involving long and sometimes unpopular courage exist in a world in which real evil tried to do us real harm. Pseudo-wisdom is the first crutch of those unwilling to give themselves to noble and dangerous missions. D-Day is not the story of politicians or pundits. It is the timeless story of ordinary men who laid down their lives so that horrific plagues of evil could not survive.