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| Pinned down on the beach. |
They are gathering today on the beaches of Normandy, in the neat, vast cemeteries
where an eerie quiet belies the shattering chaos that brought the weary bodies
to rest. It is one of the nice round
anniversaries ending in a zero. This is
number 70. Milestones like that bring
out extra pomp and Presidential visits. And they seem more poignant now, each one
attended by fewer and frailer survivors.
When the next big marker, the diamond
anniversary, comes up in 2019 most of the old soldiers there today will be
gone. In 2024, the next nice round
number, the whole generation except for a lingering atom or two, will be dissolved
in the mist. This is why we, their
children and decedents, remember them.
On June 6, 1944 the Allies invaded Nazi occupied France
under the overall command of General
Dwight D. Eisenhower. It is the iconic event of World War II in the American
memory.
It was the largest coordinated
movements of men, arms and materiel in history and had to be conducted in
enough secrecy to surprise the Germans who
had at least 55 divisions in France
while the allied effort could only put 8 ashore to secure the beachhead on the first day.
Nearly 2 million soldiers, sailors, and airmen were
involved in the total Operation Overlord,
including those landed after the first day. 195,000 naval personnel
manned 6,039 vessels including 1,200 warships and 15 hospital ships. The United States alone shipped 7
million tons of
supplies, 14 billion pounds of material including 448,000 tons of
ammunition.
Air operations in
support of D-Day, which began in April, included 14,000 missions with a loss of
2000 air craft and 12,000 airmen before the landing even began. 127 planes were lost on D-Day alone.
On June 6th U.S.
casualties were reported as 6, 603 including 1,465
dead. While these are awful numbers,
there were several Civil War battles
with greater dead. The Soviets suffered more single day
casualties four or five times. And
losses in some Pacific landings per
men engaged were more than 5 times as high.
Total allied casualties that day among U.S. British, Canadian, Free French, and Polish troops are estimated to be in excess of 10,000. German losses are less well documented but
are estimated between four and nine thousand.
After the beachhead was secured
hundreds of thousands of men and tons of supplies landed across those sands
because the Allies did not control any French port for weeks. By July 14 over a million men had come
ashore.
But heavy German resistance confined
the invaders to a small zone around the landing beaches until a breakout began on July 25.
Once free, the Allied advance across
France was remarkably swift. Despite
setbacks like the Battle of the Bulge in
December and delays in getting a bridgehead across the Rhine into the German heartland, by the following April British and
American units from the west met up with Soviet troops from the east. Within a few days of that Hitler committed suicide, Berlin fell, and the German High
Command surrendered unconditionally.
It has been my honor to know several
men who either fought on D-Day or who landed on the Normandy beaches over the
next few days. One of them was my late
father-in-law, Art Brady.
All of
them are gone now. Within a few years
the last of the veterans of D-Day will go the way of the ghosts of
Gettysburg and Belleau Wood.
The latter battle reached its peak on another June 6 in 1918 when U.S. Marines
suffered their worst single day losses in history.
So much
war. So much grief.
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