June 6th, 1944.

It’s hard to believe that it has been 75 years since over a million men landed on the shores of Normandy to begin an all-out Western assault on Nazi Germany. I remember quite vividly the pictures and videos being shown on CNN – y’know, back when it was an actual news channel and not a propaganda arm of the Daemoncrat Party – for the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, all the way back in 1994.

Quite aside from showing you that I am very much a Proud Member of Ye Olde Phartes Club at this point in my life, it is worth taking a moment – as I do every year – to ponder what was at stake all those many years ago.

June 6th stands out in the history of Western – but not Eastern European – civilisation. It was a defining moment for every Western nation. It was the day that saw the combined industrial and military might of the entire British Empire and her colonial offspring put to use against an already severely mauled and battered, but still extremely dangerous, German military.

And it could very easily have failed, with truly catastrophic consequences.

Over a million lives were at stake. Any number of small foul-ups could, and would, have cascaded into much bigger foul-ups, and men would die as a result – in their thousands, and then their tens of thousands, and eventually their hundreds of thousands.

Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower knew this better than anyone. He knew that everything had to be close to perfect in order to pull off this colossal invasion – the biggest amphibious and airborne landing in human history.

The invasion of Western Europe had been planned and prepared for well over a year, ever since the Americans waded into the war and began slowly but relentlessly pushing back the Nazis across North Africa and the Middle East. President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill knew damned well that only America had the manpower and industrial might needed to force a decisive series of battles with the Germans across the Western Front.

But first… they had to get the men there.

The defeat of the Nazis under massive pressure from the Allies in the West and the Russians in the East seems inevitable to us now, given the perspective of 75 years of history. But back then, there was nothing inevitable about it.

The sheer logistics involved in planning an invasion like that were mind-boggling. A force that was too small would have been speedily and bloodily repulsed. A force that was too large would be impossible to supply properly and the invasion would grind to a halt well before reaching the Nazi borders – and then its soldiers would have been chewed up at leisure by the Nazis.

On top of that, simply finding a landing zone large enough to accommodate so many men gave the planners fits.

The only reasonable answer lay somewhere in northern France – because then the Allies could use Britain as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” to provide naval and aerial support. But even then, the invasion had to be carefully disguised, because if the Nazis knew that the Allies were planning to land en masse in northern France, they would have done everything in their power to turn the coastlines of the area into slaughter-pens.

They very nearly succeeded in doing just that, in spite of Allied precautions. The best efforts of the Allies did not prevent the Nazis from having their suspicions – it wasn’t hard to figure out that an invasion was inevitable, after all, especially after the defeats in Sicily and Italy, which forced open a third southern front against American and British troops and armour. The Nazis knew damned well that the range of Allied landing zones was limited, and tried their best to guess which ones would be used – and worked hard to fortify them.

On top of all of that head-splitting stuff to worry about, there was the weather. It had to be reasonably calm in order to permit tens of thousands of airborne troops to land behind enemy lines and tie up Nazi reinforcements, especially heavy armour, that would absolutely be sent to the beaches once the main landings had started. And visibility had to be decent in order to permit thousands of aircraft to patrol the skies, provide close air support, and bomb targets within occupied France.

This wasn’t a grand strategic game of chess – this was a giant fustercluck of a game of go, operating in multiple dimensions, each of them insanely complicated, and every one of them extremely unpredictable.

And all of that was before the invasion even began.

Somehow, though, the Allies pulled it off – well, more or less. Field Marshall Erwin Rommel was one of the few in the German military command who was not fooled. Like the rest of the German military command, he knew perfectly well that the Allies would attempt an invasion in order to liberate France and put immense pressure on the German Western Front. It simply had to happen, for reasons political, economic, and moral. And he knew that, once tactics, logistics, and strategy were accounted for, there was only really one specific stretch of northern France that could accommodate a force large enough to seriously threaten the Nazi positions in Vichy France.

That stretch was in Normandy. And it was Erwin Rommel who ordered a massive upgrade of the fortifications on the beaches of Normandy.

It is likely that Field Marshall Rommel knew that he could not hold off an Allied invasion permanently. But he could bleed them so badly that they would either achieve a Pyrrhic victory and thereby be too weakened to mount an effective invasion of the Fatherland, or stall out and retreat in the face of massive losses.

History shows us that Gen. Rommel’s perspicacity was all for nought. He didn’t get the Panzer reinforcements that he wanted in sufficient numbers, and when the invasion did happen, the main Panzer divisions were all deployed around population centres, too far away to do any real good against the massive Allied invasion.

But that was all yet to come. On June 4th, 1944, the Allies held their breath and prepared to invade the next day.

Then, on the day that the invasion was supposed to start – June 5th – disaster struck.

The seas rose and the skies split open. Torrential rain poured down and howling winds lashed the landing craft moored in the shallows of the English Channel. The invasion simply could not proceed.

Gen. Eisenhower had no choice. He ordered the invasion delayed by 24 hours – and eventually prepared a note that would be read by him in a radio address, announcing his resignation and formal apology to the Western powers and their peoples, in the event that the invasion failed.

There was good reason for his pessimism. The entire Allied high command had serious fears and reservations about the invasion.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill is remembered today as among the greatest of Western leaders. His hallowed reputation rests on his sterling and splendid performance – overall – as Prime Minister of Britain during the Empire’s most difficult and terrible times. But before WWII, he was remembered by many for his role as First Lord of the Admiralty in planning and executing the disaster that was the Allied invasion of Gallipoli in 1915.

Over 56,000 Allied troops died in the Gallipoli campaign, and over 123,000 were wounded – out of a total Allied strength of nearly half a million men by the end of it all.

Like the Normandy invasion, Gallipoli was supposed to bring the Germans to their knees by opening up a new front and taking out an important member of the Central Powers. Like the Normandy invasion, Gallipoli involved meticulous and difficult planning that ran into unforeseen obstacles repeatedly.

The failures of Gallipoli were seared into the minds of the military planners for Normandy. They also had additional evidence from the Dieppe Raid of 1942 which told them that an invasion of Nazi-held territory would be no joke at all.

But, in the end, resolution overcame doubt and the order was given to invade.

There were multiple beaches involved in the Normandy invasion, of course, but the one that stands out in popular memory is Omaha Beach, where the fiercest fighting occurred. This was where the Army Rangers had to scale sheer cliffs to reach entrenched Nazi bunkers and artillery sites, and destroy them. This was where the main bulk of the roughly 10,000 Allied casualties on the day – of which about 5,000 were killed outright – were run up. And this was where the invasion might very well have foundered and failed entirely.

It is nearly impossible to do this 75 years on, but try to imagine for a moment what it was like on that June day.

You’re a young GI, maybe 17-18 years old. You’ve never really seen combat before. You have a gun in your hands, a rucksack on your back, and you’ve been through basic training in England at an accelerated pace in order to get you ready for an invasion that, until just a few weeks ago, was completely hush-hush.

You’ve been stuck inside of a miserable, cramped, smelly, damp, dank landing craft for many hours. It stinks inside because many of the men beside you have been quite sick thanks to the very rough seas of the English Channel.

But now, you are on a boat heading slowly but relentlessly toward the coast of France under heavy grey skies.

You get ordered to board your amphibious assault craft. You look to your left and your right, and you see thousands of ships on every side. You look up, and you see tens of thousands of aircraft roaring overhead. You hear the booming of the guns on the cruisers and battleships as they shell the shit out of the coastline in front of you.

And then you see the huge plumes of water shooting up as the Nazi artillery shells land in the water, far too close to your tiny little assault ship for comfort, and you hear the BOOM-crump of the shells as they are fired and the deafening, terrifying detonations, and you hear the crack and the whiz of Nazi machine gun fire as the bullets shoot into the sand and the water and over your head…

And suddenly you realise that you are in a really-for-real shooting war, and the cliffs looming in front of you are the very jaws of Hell itself.

How many of us today would have the guts to face that?

How many could convince ourselves to jump off the boats and into the water – the freezing, churning, salty water, rapidly turning into red foam with the blood of our brothers – and half-swim, half-drown our way onto the beaches under intense fire from those same cliffs?

How many of us would be able to avoid curling up into a ball to avoid the horrors outside, and get kicked and punched and cursed out by our sergeants before being thrown bodily into the water, possibly to die by drowning – perhaps the third most horrible way to die?

To ask these questions, while looking around at the soft and squishy and utterly pampered modren generation, is to answer it.

D-Day is celebrated as a watershed moment in Western civilisation because it is one. It was not the only invasion of France; there was at least one subsequent mass beachhead established on the northern French coast, and later in the year another assault in southern France to liberate Marseilles. But it was the moment that the West proved to itself that it could muster the numbers, the strength, and most importantly the sheer courage, to do something that everyone thought was impossible.

Those men launched themselves straight into the jaws of Hell because, in the end, there was simply no other choice. They did what they had to do – and in so doing, gave their descendants a legacy that we can rightly be deeply proud of.

HAIL the victorious dead!