Sometimes, punching Nazis isn’t enough. You need to bomb, shoot, and stab those motherfuckers. Kick their asses so hard their vertebrae pop out of their mouths like a goddamn PEZ dispenser. (I stole that line from Reddit.) They are not very fine people. They never were. So let’s celebrate the anniversary of the biggest amphibious invasion in history when nations banded together to fuck some Nazi shit up.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: June 6, 1944--
To give you an idea of how determined the Allies were to defeat the fucking Nazis on the Western Front, on June 6, 1944—also known as D-Day—there were 287,000 personnel aboard ships crossing the English Channel. This doesn’t include the 24,000 airborne troops who parachuted into France in the early morning hours.
Storming the five beaches that day were 73,000 British soldiers, 59,000 Americans, and 21,000 Canadians. The troops faced 40,000 Germans in bunkers in elevated positions. As we know, the Allies won the day and began the inexorable push into West Germany. But victory came at a terrible cost. The cost in lives could have been far higher, however, or the Allied landings a devastating failure, if not for one critical component of the campaign that made it successful: disinformation.
In The Art of War Sun Tzu wrote, “All warfare is based on deception . . . when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.” The Allies took that advice.
The Allies had their shit wired tight when it came to the secrecy of the D-Day landing location. The British Isles were locked down, and German spies had no success in penetrating the counterintelligence veil of secrecy. Rather, spies were caught and told to be double agents or face execution.
There was fake radio traffic, controlled leaks, and even an entire fake army with inflatable tanks and fake paratrooper landings to make the Germans believe the attack was coming at Calais, France, which made sense due to it being by far the closest point to England. When Normandy was attacked, the deception continued to make the Germans believe the invasion was a feint to draw German troops away from Calais, where the “real attack” was imminent. But Normandy, 150 miles to the south of Calais, was the planned attack all along. The Allies were far away from Calais, and made the Germans think they were near.
By the time the Germans realized their folly—the military one, I mean, not the decision to be fucking Nazis in the first place—it was too late. Hitler was so well and truly fooled by the deception that it was seven weeks before he authorized releasing reinforcements from Calais to head to Normandy. But by then a solid beachhead was established by the Allies, and the fascists’ days were numbered.
Those who cannot remember the past … need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of “On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down” at JamesFell.com/books.
janainaart
jacobvanloon
origamiaround
jbbartram-illu
