https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/07/d-day-at-80-how-the-allies-won-at-normandy-and-changed-history/?utm_source=r
They knew what was worth fighting and dying for
Zero hundred hours, Tuesday, June 6, 1944
British and American airborne troops, flown in on more than 1,000 aircraft, began to land in occupied Normandy in order to secure key objectives before the landings by sea. Elite Pathfinder units arrived first, marking out the terrain. “The first Skytrains appeared,” one observer later recalled, “silhouetted like groups of scudding bats.” German flak hit the planes “like large hailstones on a tin roof” as the paratroopers trod floors slippery with vomit and readied themselves before jumping down and down, thousands of feet, sometimes through cloud and fog. They were weighed down by up to 80 pounds of weapons, ammunition, and supplies. They knew that when they reached the ground, there would be merciless opposition — some of those whose parachutes got caught in trees were burned alive by flamethrower. They fought in fields and hedgerows lit only by the moon and by tracer fire.
What men they were. How can we not, reading of their actions that extraordinary day, hold our manhood cheap when we contemplate what they attempted, and achieved. It makes us wonder how we would have fared had it been our generation that had to liberate Europe from Nazism. “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier,” said Dr. Johnson, “or not having been at sea.” To contemplate the experiences of the men who fought on D-Day 80 years ago this month is to appreciate the true nature of what we, sometimes all too glibly, call “the Greatest Generation.”
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Part of the vast invasion fleet of more than 6,800 vessels was spotted by the Germans in Cherbourg, but the Germans were already fighting Allied airborne troops and could not react to the threat of the largest seaborne assault in history as it sailed toward Normandy. One German noncommissioned officer said the ships looked like “a gigantic town on the sea.” The defenses at Cherbourg were so powerful that the Allied planners had to choose five beaches on which to land, in what was to be the greatest campaign of the western war.
Unlike the strategy of any other military operation in the 20th century, this one depended for success on a single day’s fighting. If what the planners described as a “satisfactory foothold” had not been gained by nightfall, it very likely wouldn’t be gained at all. It was therefore a desperate, war-defining risk that justified the commitment of no fewer than ten Army divisions, going ashore in two great waves.
British prime minister Winston Churchill fully recognized the dangers. In the fifth volume of his history of the Second World War, he wrote about the demands for an early “second front” in western Europe:
The Channel tides have a play of more than twenty feet, with corresponding scours along the beaches. The weather is always uncertain, and winds and gales may whip up in a few hours irresistible forces against frail human structures. The fools or knaves who had chalked “Second Front Now” on our walls for the past two years had not had their minds burdened by such problems. I had long pondered upon them.
An overhasty return to the Continent, before the battle of the Atlantic was won and complete air superiority gained, could have resulted in disaster. As Churchill recalled telling Joseph Stalin at the Kremlin in August 1942 when he demanded an immediate second front, “War was war but not folly, and it would be folly to invite a disaster which would help nobody.”
“If the Germans decided to bring their maximum forces to the beachheads,” estimated the historian Sir Martin Gilbert, “the Allied armies could have been defeated on the shore.” There had already been a long history of failed or faulty amphibious operations in both world wars — Gallipoli, Dakar, Dieppe, Salerno, and Anzio among them. Landing troops on hostile shores against determined enemy resistance is the hardest of all military maneuvers.
