The Allies were there to return peace, freedom, and security to Europe. Soldiers and civilians paid for this in blood. But what was the alternative?
Today marks the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France.
In our editorial, we note the words of Ronald Reagan, who, speaking in Normandy in 1984 to veterans who took part in that historic day, said: “You were here to liberate, not to conquer.”
It’s estimated that at least 3,000 French civilians were killed on D-Day. Many of them would have died in Allied bombardment, which went on for months after the initial invasion. Counting the long years of the war, the total number of French civilians killed by American and British bombing is estimated to be 50,000.
That’s 50,000 noncombatant men, women, and children.
To minimize civilian casualties, Allied forces dropped leaflets with specific warnings. But they weren’t always effective. Sometimes, the leaflets were blown astray by the wind. Other times, German forces prevented civilians from evacuating from affected areas such as Caen, Rouen, and Le Havre. The Allies went ahead and dropped their bombs anyway. They needed to win.
Did anyone then accuse them of mass murder? Does anyone now see that as “genocide”?
Yves Marchais, who was six at the time, told the Associated Press that “the Americans, for us, were gods.”
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote after the war: “You will never know what faith in our Allies it took to continue to love them, to want with them the destruction they wrought on our soil, in spite of everything.”
The burden of the human cost weighed heavily on the Allies, too. The Wall Street Journal reports:
On June 6, 1944, Robert Edward Pedigo was the nose gunner of a bomber that flew over the English Channel. Looking down he saw an armada of boats so dense that they appeared to form a bridge to Normandy. His mission on D-Day was to bomb a German encampment, but in the weeks to come he and his crew would also hit Saint-Lô.
“Many people died, but we saved millions,” said Pedigo who, at 100 years old, set foot in Normandy for the first time this week. Macron awarded the Legion of Honor, France’s highest order of merit, to Pedigo at a D-Day ceremony on Thursday.
Understandably, others have difficulty seeing things that way. André Laurent told the Journal that on June 6, 1944 — the year before he was born — a U.S. bomber dropped explosives on his family’s home, killing nine people including his uncles, aunts, and grandmother. His family attended an annual memorial service to commemorate the civilian victims of the war. From the Journal:
“It wasn’t specified that this was due to the American bombing,” Laurent said. “But my mother had a strong resentment toward the Americans, more so than the Germans, which is understandable…. We told her, OK, but these are indirect effects of the war.”
“The Americans were our liberators; we must recognize this,” Laurent added.
The Allies were there to liberate, not to conquer. And in so doing, to return peace, freedom, and security to Europe. They paid for this in blood, including their own. But what was the alternative? Continue under Nazi occupation? That, everyone seems to agree, would have been intolerable.