Today is the 70th anniversary of D-Day.
This is the day on which the largest sea-borne invasion ever staged took place, on which Operation Neptune saw 156,000 Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy.
4,414 Allied forces lost their lives in the course of the operation, and a further 226,386 casualties incurred by the end of Operation Overlord which followed. This number does not include the Allied Air Force’s losses of 16,714 lives during sorties in support of ground troops. German losses are estimated to be between 400,000 to 450,000.
The cost of freedom is always high. Far higher than the stark and impersonal numbers listed here, because behind each single number is a life lost, a family shattered and broken by grief and loss. For each wounded soldier that made it home there is a life irredeemably changed, shaped into something new and horribly alien.
The cost, though, however high, is never too high to pay. Freedom is worth the sacrifice, and it is an inalienable right of every man, woman and child on this Earth.
The weather was terrible on June 5th, the original date planned for D-Day, forcing a single day’s delay. But even still on June 6th, 1944, the seas were rough. The allied forces then faced the Atlantic Wall, personally strengthened in design by Field Marshall Erwin Rommel who was arguably one of the greatest strategic minds that ever graced a field of battle. The Germans manning the pillboxes were well-positioned, well-supplied, and very, very well-trained. No amount of training could prepare the men for the moment the backs of the transports fell away and they slogged into the shallows towards the headland. Bullets whizzed around them, knocking friends and comrades down, singing off the metal of the ships or the concrete of the tank barriers. It was, in the words of Sapper Harry Billinge, “a killing field.”
Among those invading Normandy were members of the Free French. For them, the day was especially fraught with meaning; they were participating in an invasion of their own sacred lands. Bombs would be dropped, civilians likely killed, roads torn up, bridges destroyed. Towns leveled in retaliation, as at Ouradour-sur-Glane where 642 civilians; men, women, and children, were massacred and the town razed by the Nazis. According to an eye-witness statement, a baby had even been crucified. Seven people survived the massacre itself, and another 20 lived by fleeing when the soldiers were first spotted. Out of the entire population of the village, those 27 people were the only ones left alive.
These were the things De Gaulle’s men feared, but they knew they could not leave France as it was; unfree and undefended by the leaders of the Vichy government. They broadcast dispatches to the civilian population not already affiliated with the Resistance, telling them that now they were all at war; it was their solemn duty to be as annoying as possible to the Germans; cars were to break down in front of supply lines, aid was to be given to the Allies and none to the Germans… civil disobedience. The population by and large complied, bless them.
France was, of course, simply the first objective; the Allies intended to chase the German forces all the way back to Germany, and this they did.
But the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany came on June 6th, 1944, while Hitler slept and his generals paced in impotent rage waiting for their leader’s permission to move the Panzer division into position. The sucessful invasion of Normandy set the stage, and it was a blow from which the German war machine would not recover.
In the end, the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, and it is not too far a stretch to say it, saved the world. They, and all veteans who fight for freedom the world over, deserve out gratitude, our thanks, and our remembrance.
The youngest person to serve in the United States Armed Forces during the war lied about his age and joined up at 12 in 1942. He died in 1992. It is estimated that by 2036 there will be no surviving World War II veterans left alive in any nation; even if they joined at age 13 in the same year as our youngest, by 2036 they would be aged 105. We are fast losing our Greatest Generation. Soon there will be none left who remember the big moments, and plenty of smaller moments have slipped by without anyone realizing it.
The last surviving Navajo Code Talker died on June 4th, 2014, just two days ago. Theirs was a mission that won the Allies the Pacific Theater, now largely neglected by history and the knowledge of the world save for a Hollywood movie. Even less known are the Choctaw and Cherokee who pioneered the art in World War I. None of them now survive either.
What happened in the trenches on April 1st, 1945? Did someone play a prank on their buddy? Did the Battle of Okinawa, started on that day, also include some pin-up girl hijinks among a bomber crew? If it did, no one knows or remembers. Those stories, the ones not already known to history, the small stories, those are the ones that are dying out.
The moments and thoughts, the personal touches that make those numbers into humans, that is what we are losing. We are losing the humanity behind the losses, and thus perspective on their sacrifices.
Someone has to remember them. It ought to be us, who are free because of their sacrifices.
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