D-Day Remember Why

D-Day, the sixth of June 1944… Today, 78 years later, we honor the more than 73,000 soldiers, paratroopers, and sailors who stormed the beaches of Normandy in what General Dwight D. Eisenhower called the Great Crusade. They were the tip of the spear that forced open Hitler’s Fortress Europa. More than 2,800 Americans died on that one day. It is only right that they be remembered and honored for what they did and for their many sacrifices.

But, to honor them is not truly enough. We must remember why those men risked their lives, some never to be another day older. To not understand why their sacrifices were necessary dishonors their very sacrifices. It is more complicated than to say for freedom or to defeat Nazism.

Led by the megalomaniacal psychopath, Adolf Hitler, Germany and the Nazis conquered almost all of Europe by 1940. Hitler buttressed with the power and acquiescence of a single-party state had no one or nothing to stop him in his pursuit of conquest and plans for racial supremacy, purity and racial extermination.

Their evil presented an existential threat to the USA and all of western civilization. So great was this danger that President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a Germany First strategy in prosecuting the world war despite the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

Why? The Nazis and Nazi Germany were infected with hatred, with bigotry, with racism, with aggressive nationalism and fully embraced violence as a solution for all their enemies, real and imagined.

This stood in stark contrast to the Four Freedoms Roosevelt identified in his 1941 State of the Union Address, also known as the Four Freedoms Speech: freedom of speech and expression; freedom of every person to worship God in his own way; freedom from want; and freedom from fear.

Roosevelt identified these freedoms and the peril tyranny posed to the US eleven months prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany’s declaration of war against the US four days later. It was no prophetic vision. The speech was one piece of Roosevelt’s longer campaign to make Americans aware of the existential threat Hitler and Germany posed. He recognized the Nazi menace as early as the mid-1930s.

Americans did not want to hear about it. They happily embraced isolationism and the idea of putting America first in the grand schemes of the world. America would be okay if it just took care of itself. The famous aviator and American Firster Charles Lindbergh thought this way. He became a major proponent of American isolationism and critic of Roosevelt.

America was not alone in its sentiments. The great European powers were also more concerned about their own issues than the growing menace in Germany. Every time Hitler pushed the boundaries of accepted norms of behavior Britain and France, the two main European powers, did nothing. Justifications were found to make sense of Hitler’s actions and the belief that he would now be satisfied—even when he pushed the boundaries even further. By the time the British and French fully understood resistance was needed it was too late.

Hitler’s strength and his hubris grew stronger every time he bested his opponents. In late summer 1939, he knew the time to strike was ripe. And, he did—starting World War II on September 1, 1939. America declared its neutrality. As the German military behemoth swept across Europe, Americans held on to what they saw as the wisdom of isolationism. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor blasted that misguided wisdom into smithereens, literally and figuratively. The nation was at war and it was completely unprepared for it.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the US army was smaller than Portugal’s army, less than 200,00 men. American soldiers trained with wooden machine guns and trucks with signs identifying them as tanks during training maneuvers. They would face the daunted German blitzkrieg and a Japanese military hardened by a decade of warfare in China.

But the US was a big country with a big population. About 16,000,000 men and women served in the US military during the war, most not in direct combat. Some of them were immigrants. Many of them were the sons of immigrants whose parents spoke little or no English. For Hitler this made America a mongrel nation sure to fall to Germany’s racial purity and Aryan superiority. His hatred and bigotry blinded him to the latent power of this melting pot just waiting to be unleashed.

For all its size and material power, the US was too small to win the war without combining forces with its Allies.

Those US soldiers and sailors who invaded Normandy on D-Day were part of a much larger invasion force. British and Canadian forces, along with a handful of Free French soldiers, landed east of the Americans on Utah and Omaha Beaches. British ships and landing craft, manned by British sailors carried many of the men of the 29th and 1st divisions onto the deadly beaches. About 2,000 British and Canadians died during the assault. Further assistance came from the men and women of the French Underground. It was an international operation of immense size and complexity and success. Eventually, their effort led to the defeat of Germany and its Nazi ugliness and inhumanity.

It was the success of those young men and boys of 75 years ago that marked the beginning of the end of Hitler and his Nazi Regime. Many more would be killed in the next 11 months of the war. My maternal grandfather, Russell Kenneth Bunker, was killed five weeks later in the last stages of the Battle of Normandy that began with the Normandy invasion. Like most of those killed on D-Day, he is buried at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial located in Colleville-sur-Mer above the now peaceful beaches once known as Omaha Beach.

They destroyed the poison of a megalomaniacal psychopath empowered by a single-party state devoted to personal loyalty instead of honorable virtues of democracy and human rights. They defeated evil in the form of hatred, bigotry, racism, aggressive nationalism and violence as the only solution. It was more than the courage of those soldiers and sailors that triumphed 78 years ago today.

Their victory that day led to the ultimate victory of Eisenhower's Great Crusade and the ideals of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. It was why they were there and why so many died on the beaches or in the cold waters of the English Channel or parachuted to their deaths in some dark, lonely Norman field.

As we honor those who fought that day, we should never forget why they were needed and why they faced the horrors of warfare. If we forget why they sacrificed, if we don’t live up to those virtues, if we don’t confront similar evil, we condemn those brave men to wasted sacrifices and purposeless deaths. They deserve so much better than that.