The waves crashed and the rain was falling in sheets over the English Channel on June 5, 1944, so the former farm boy from Abilene, Kan., Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had risen to become Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, ordered a 24-hour delay on the advice of his lead meteorologist, Group Captain James Stagg.
D-Day would be Tuesday, June 6, 1944.
If the weather did not break, as Stagg predicted it would, the great invasion would need to be postponed for at least a month until the finicky tides in the Channel were once again in the Anglo-American Allies’ favor.
If the Allies risked it anyway, but the skies did not clear enough for airborne troops to make their jumps or for Allied warplanes to protect the beachheads, an onrush of German tanks could crush the toeholds on French sand.
If the assault failed — as many feared it could — the blow to the prestige of American arms would be severe, but the cost in blood, treasure, and, critically, time would be immeasurable. The Soviets had been agitating for a new front in northwest Europe for years, as had many brash Americans, when cooler heads knew that the U.S. Army was not yet ready. The British, with an ancestral aversion to attritional campaigns on the continent and memories of the bloodbaths at Passchendaele and the Somme fresh in their hearts, were more cautious. Though the tide had turned in Russia and in the Mediterranean, there was much fighting and dying left to be done. A setback in Normandy would consign all of Europe to a longer Nazi occupation, and possibly permanent Soviet control.
It’s easy enough to assume, looking back on those events 80 years ago today, that eventual Allied victory was assured; that the outcome of specific battles might be unknown, but that the war itself would surely be won.
But Ike wasn’t so sure. War is always a contingent endeavor. He knew that the courage and cowardice of individual men tip events, and that Lady Luck always claims her roll of the dice. Though the Allied armada then steaming toward the Normandy coast was the largest and most powerful to ever put to sea, it was by no means assured that Operation Overlord would not end in defeat.
In 1942, the bold amphibious raid on the French port of Dieppe, 100 miles up the coast from the Normandy invasion beaches, put a division of Canadian infantry and a regiment of tanks onto the European continent. It ended as an absolute fiasco, with more than half of the attackers killed or captured by the Germans. The next year, in 1943, the Allied invasion of Italy, Operation Avalanche, almost saw the British and American landing forces at Salerno cut to pieces and thrown back into the sea. If the German army was good at one thing — bloodied from years of fighting though it was — it was the aggressive counterattack.
The challenge of Normandy was immense. The result of D-Day was world-historic. As the historian Andrew Roberts has written in these pages, “Operation Overlord was to be the supreme expression of the cooperation, strength, and determination of the English-speaking peoples.”
When Britain, Canada, and the United States put fighting men ashore in France on Tuesday, June 6, 1944, they came as an army of free men to destroy the “monstrous tyranny” that Winston Churchill had indicted four years before. They stormed the slave state of Hitler’s Fortress Europe. With their own blood, they liberated a suffering continent.
The men who landed on French beaches or parachuted from the skies that June morning 80 years ago today are now very old and very gray — the few who are left with us, that is. The average age of veterans of Normandy hovers at over 100. This decadal anniversary may well be the last in which veterans of the action are present to be honored.
Why did they do it?
Ronald Reagan asked the right questions in 1984, when these men were in their sixties, and an American president traveled to the cliffs above Omaha Beach to pay them honor.
You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet, you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here?
“We look at you,” Reagan told the assembled veterans, “and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love.”
“You were here to liberate,” Reagan told the boys of Pointe du Hoc, “not to conquer.”