D-Day +80
"Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."
This was the speech General Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in pencil on June 5, 1944, which he would have delivered had the Normandy landings failed. Luckily for everything we hold dear, he never had to deliver the speech. American, Canadian, and British forces seized the beachheads, and a little less than a year later would celebrate V-E Day, the Thousand Year Reich in ruin and ash.
This year marks the eightieth anniversary of those landings, of, as Gen. Eisenhower called it, the great crusade to free Europe. I was always fascinated by the Second World War, having watched the seminal documentary series, The World At War, when I was all of nine or ten. My beloved grandfather, who was safe in Cuba during the war, would spin yarns about how black the skies were that day, swarming with Allied airplanes delivering justice upon the Nazi armies.
D-Day was the fulcrum which ushered in our modern world. Without its success, our world would be unimaginable. It wouldn't have meant an outright Nazi victory; but it would have meant a longer war, and maybe the abandoning of the Allied demand for "unconditional surrender", leading to a negotiated truce. Considering America's racism, I am not sanguine that the United States would have resisted the blandishments of Nazi interlocutors saying that Germany and America weren't all that different. The world would have been a much darker place. The Jews of Europe would have been killed to the last, and there would have been no Israel. (Fatherland, by Robert Harris, is a great counterfactual novel in which Joseph P. Kennedy is president in the 1960s facing off in a cold war against Nazi Germany.)
One would have hoped that crushing Nazi Germany would have also crushed fascism. But as we are seeing in our own day, that has turned out to be far from the case. Destroying Germany was the easy part; destroying its ideology may have always been a fool's quest. I look at this in the same way over the war against Hamas: Hamas can be defeated in the field, but defeating it in the mind will be much more difficult, as difficult as destroying Nazism has been. The Shadow always returns, for it is part of the warp and weft of this mortal universe.
But that is no reason to give up the fight. No, quite to the contrary. The fight against the forces of hate and violence is what defines us. In that truism, freedom isn't free. There will always be men and women who take delight in nothing other than seeing the world burn. The fight in which we find ourselves now is no different from the fight those heroes faced on Sword and Gold, on Juno, on Omaha and Utah. Their fight quelled the evil for a bit; but it has returned, for humans forget, and get lured by others offering simple solutions to complex problems.
Young men stormed Normandy's beaches didn't know what they would face. They didn't know if they would succeed. The didn't know if they would survive to the nighttime. We, likewise, don't know how our fight will turn out. Will we raise a fist in triumph, or fight a rearguard retreat? But we have no choice. We fight, or we die. We strive for a world united under a banner of liberal democracy, or we give it over to the likes of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Ali Khamenei.
We dare not falter. We dare not shirk. We struggle for the shape of the world. We struggle to provide a decent human life to every person on this planet. A free humanity, where every human has the freedom to achieve whatever he or she wants to achieve, free from oppression. We fight for nothing less than that. We stand on the shoulders of those young men who eighty years ago emerged out of the Channel mist, going to meet their fates. We must be as courageous as they.
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