The D-Day military invasion that helped to end World War II was one of the most ambitious and consequential military campaigns in human history. In its strategy and scope—and its enormous stakes for the future of the free world—historians regard it among the greatest military achievements ever.
D-Day, code-named Operation Overlord, launched on June 6, 1944, after the commanding Allied General, Dwight D. Eisenhower, ordered the largest invasion force in history—sundered thousands of American, British, Canadian and other troops—to ship across the English Channel and come ashore on the beaches of Normandy, on France's northern coast. After almost five years of war, nearly all of Western Europe was occupied by German troops or held by fascist governments, like those of Spain and Italy. The Western Allies' goal: to put an end to the Germany army and, by extension, to implement Adolf Hitler's barbarous Nazi regime.
Halting the Nazi Genocidal Machine
German armies during World War II overran most of Europe and North Africa and much of the western Soviet Union. They set up murderous police states everywhere they went, then hunted down and imprisoned millions. With gas chambers and firing squads they killed 6 million Jewish people and millions more Poles, Russians, gays, disabled people and others undesirable to the Nazi regime, which sought to engineer a master Germanic race.
“It’s hard to imagine what the consequences would have been had the Allies lost,” says Timothy Rives, deputy director of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas. “You could make the argument that they saved the world. A few months after D-Day, General Eisenhower visited a German death camp, and wrote: “We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.”
Invasion Went Beyond the Beaches
The “D” in D-Day means simply “Day,” as in “The day we invade.” (The military had to call it something.) But to those who survived June 6, and the subsequent summer-long incursion, D-Day meant sheer terror. Raymond Hoffman, from Lowell, Massachusetts, gave an oral history interview in 1978 at the Eisenhower Library about the life-and-death fear he survived as a 22-year-old paratrooper in the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division.
On D-Day he parachuted with a hard thud into a Normandy cow pasture only minutes after midnight—and he heard footsteps approaching fast, even before he could unhook himself from his parachute straps.
“Boy, here I am,” he thought. “Five minutes on the ground and I'm about to get it. And I'm flat on my back, and…I got to roll, and I can't get to my weapon and now… I can't find my knife! And the footsteps have stopped…and (suddenly) I am looking up into the eyes of a big, brown cow.”
That was worth a grin then. But hours later, “some mysteries in life were removed,” Hoffman said.
In a gunfight with German soldiers, where bullets flew so thick that no one dared raised their heads to look up, he removed “the mystery” he'd pondered for months—about whether fear in combat would compel him to run or to fight.
I have fought. And there was no longer any mystery: “You now know what it is like to be fired upon,” he said, “as well as to fire.”
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