You wouldn’t know it from all of the headlines concerning riots and madness infecting the entire Western world right now, but today marks the 76th anniversary of the start of the massive Allied invasion of France. That invasion started with the assault on the beaches of Normandy, and on that day, thousands of men fought and bled and died to bring an end to the most horrible war that anyone could imagine up to that point.

Legends were forged on that day, such as that of “The Boys of Pointe du Hoc“. Heroes fought to the bitter end, on both sides. Germans opened the gates of Hell itself upon the Allied infantrymen wading ashore through the pounding surf of Omaha Beach, raining shot and shell down on them. Americans and Canadians and British and New Zealanders and many others bayoneted, grenaded, shot, clubbed, and mauled their German opponents to their gruesome deaths.

The West considers D-Day to be one of its foundational legends. There is a strong belief among Westerners – which is unfortunately quite mistaken – that D-Day was the beginning of the end of the war for Nazi Germany. It was not. The real cause of the German collapse was not the invasion of Normandy, significant and consequential though it was. No, the true cause was in fact the destruction of several German armies and much of the cream of its heavy infantry and armoured cavalry (i.e. tanks) in the Eastern Front, in meat-grinders like Stalingrad and Kursk.

The Russians were the ones who truly paid the price to bleed Germany dry, and to grind the German offensive down and stall it and then throw it in reverse. They died in their millions to achieve this. And Russians everywhere, but especially those in towns that were once occupied by the Germans, get very irritated by Western propaganda making it seem as though the end of WWII was somehow a “Western” victory.

But none of that mattered to the boys who set ashore that day – and many of them were mere boys, barely able to grow facial hair.

They had orders to go ashore and fight, to take the cliffs of Normandy from the Germans and to hold them against enemy counterattacks, and to establish a beachhead so that more men and supplies could be pushed through into the heart of France and then Germany itself.

They carried out those orders, regardless of cost, as they drowned in the surf and bled to death from bullet-wounds and were torn apart by artillery barrages from the cliffs above.

Looking back at what they suffered, and how the survivors of that generation bore with such remarkable stoicism the memories of the Hell that they went through, one does have to wonder what they would make of their descendants literally selling out the priceless inheritance that they gave them.

Today we have forgotten what war and strife mean – though every sign that we have in front of us, tells us that we are about to rediscover these things, to our extremely painful shock. And when, not if, we find ourselves enmeshed in the kinds of wars that will make the horrific battles of WWII look like a Saturday evening debate in a gentlemen’s club in London, we may perhaps find ourselves looking back upon what our grandfathers and great-grandfathers did at Normandy and elsewhere with renewed appreciation.

That, unfortunately, is sometimes what it takes to understand what previous generations gave us.

The Greatest Generation is well-named. They went forth, did their duty without complaint, came back, and rebuilt. They didn’t forget what happened and why. They simply tried to move on from what they did – by living, where their brothers had died.

Today we look back and remember the men who waded ashore that fateful June day, through both the literal storms that wracked the fleet the night before and the storm of steel that rained down upon them as they did their duty.

Learn well the lessons of self-sacrifice, duty, courage, honour, and simple human decency from those men. The time is coming soon when we will all need to remember them.

HAIL the victorious dead!