Thursday, June 6, marked the 75th anniversary of the Allied landing on the shores of Normandy, marking not only the turning point of World War II, but the turning point of the 20th century.
Troops from the United States, Great Britain and Canada, joined by units from Free French forces who had taken shelter when France fell to Nazi Germany in 1940 landed on the shores of the French coastline under heavy fire from defenders.
To those of us born decades later, the largest amphibious operation is settled history, but on the early morning of June 6, nothing was certain.
The British spy network and its double agents had convinced the Germans that if any attack were to happen on the French coast facing England, it would be at Pas de Calais, the nearest point between the island and the continent.
U.S. Army Gen. George S. Patton, who had garnered fear and respect from Wehrmacht generals for his successes in North Africa, was expected to be among the first commanders on the beach. Knowing this, the Allies put him in command of the 1st U.S. Army Group, stationed in Dover, across the English Channel from Calais.
At the time of the Normandy Invasion, the 1st U.S. Army Group was larger than the 21st Army Group, commanded by Patton’s friendly rival, British Gen. Bernard Montgomery.
Yet the 1st U.S. Army Group existed only on paper, and the “phantom army,” as it was later known, consisted or rubber and plywood tanks, fake radio traffic and deception methods to convince the Germans and any potential spies in the area that it was the main invasion force.
Even hours after paratroopers seized villages and bridgeheads in Normandy and heavy equipment was rolling onto secured beachheads, German military leaders were still waiting for Patton to make a move.
American, Canadian, British and Free French forces that secured the beaches, the sealanes and the air were aided by Australian and New Zealand aircraft and Norwegian warships, while ground forces were soon joined by allied troops from Poland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands — whose homelands had also been occupied by Nazi forces between 1938 to 1940 — as well as colonial troops from Great Britain’s overseas colonies.
More than 1.3 million troops eventually came ashore in northern France to battle Germany and push its armies back to Berlin. More than 120,000 were lost or wounded on the beach, in the fields, towns and villages of Normandy and northern France before the bridgehead was declared secured by mid-July.
The Allies fought deep into France and swept east, eventually connecting with forces fighting up the Italian Peninsula since 1943 and Soviet armies who had been battling the Nazis since 1941.
Less than a year after a heterogeneous alliance of democratic states landed on French soil, the Nazi state was defeated and victory was declared in Europe.
On the other side of the world, the Nazi’s last wartime ally, Imperial Japan, remained in the fight after Germany surrendered in May 1945, but had been pushed back to its Home Islands and would surrender by August.
The soldiers and support personnel who remember the war first-hand are fewer and fewer every day, as the youngest of those who remember the war are now in their 80s, 90s or over 100.
For these men and women, the war galvanized their characters and their constitutions, creating a generation who served their nation and their fellow citizens selflessly whether in uniform or on the home front.
Many of those men who gave the last full measure of devotion on the battlefield are still buried in cemeteries in France, or were lost in combat and never found. All those still there are forever honored by the nation they helped liberate and remembered by their relatives and descendants half a world away.
I was fortunate to spend time with my grandfather, Frank Leslie Redfield, before he died in 2004, learning about his service. At the time of the Normandy invasion, he was in the U.S. Navy aboard the USS Princeton, an Independence-class aircraft carrier that later sunk at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. Fortunately he survived the War in the Pacific, but many of the men he served with did not return.
As we pass the 75th anniversary of D-Day, we honor all those who fought for those of us yet unborn, so we did not have to experience terror and tyranny they resisted and defeated.
— Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
