The Sacrifice at Normandy – An Historic Remembrance and a Missed Opportunity

This week was the 75^th anniversary of the Normandy invasion.  Apart from the incredible irony of President Bone Spurs representing this country at the remembrance ceremonies, the event reminds us of the profound sacrifices that so many made in World War II to remove three fascist and militaristic states – Germany, Italy and Japan - from their cruel tyrannies over so many lands.

That the Allies who stormed Normandy beach and fought the ensuing battles across France are deserving of our solemn thanks is clear.  But it saddens me, and strikes me as a missed opportunity, that we did not invite and embrace Russia as a part of this somber recognition of sacrifice.

We Americans have sometimes been a force for good in this world, and no doubt we deserve to recognize World War II as a time of noble endeavor for our land.  But we also carry several myths about our involvement in the world wars that tend to skew our understanding of the world and estrange us from potential reconciliation with current adversaries.

Let’s start with World War I, the first war that saw us ‘save’ Europe.  That war lasted four years, from 1914-1918.  We declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary in April 1917 after three years of attrition had worn down all of the belligerents.  The first significant battle that the Americans fought was in April of 1918 at Chateau-Thierry, only four months before the German commander-in-chief Ludendorff confessed the inevitability of defeat in his missives to the German government. 

The arrival of the Americans in massive numbers through the summer of 1918 was certainly a morale booster for the French and British, but the Germans were already beaten.  The final 100 days offensive from August to November simply put the allies in a position where they could dictate draconian terms to the Germans, which of course set up conditions that ultimately led to the rise of fascism and the second world war.

The Americans lost 110,000 men in the war, of which 45,000 died of influenza.  The Germans, Austrians, Russians, English and French lost 2, 1.2, 1.8, 1.4 and 1.1 million respectively.  To say that the U.S. was anything but the final nail in the German coffin is to trivialize the unbelievable carnage that Europe suffered during this time.

World War II was different, particularly in the Pacific.  There the U.S. bore the brunt of the war and the bulk of allied casualties.  The sacrifices our armed forces made in dislodging the Japanese from their occupied territories were truly tremendous and deserve our eternal respect.

The European theater, though, was a bit different.  We like to think that the U.S. was the primary reason why the Nazis were beaten, but the simple fact is that Russia was overwhelmingly the most significant factor in ending Hitler’s grip on Europe.  The German army invaded Russia in the summer of 1941, and from that moment on it was engaged in a titanic struggle against the Soviet Union.

 

The Allies promised Stalin that they would open a second front in Europe by invading France in 1942, but that invasion was put off until two years later, and the Soviet Union rallied its people in one of the most amazing efforts in the history of warfare to hurl back the Germans and keep the majority of their forces in battle for the rest of the war.  The Soviets lost more men at a single battle, Stalingrad, than the Allies lost in the entire war.  The Allies broke promise after promise to the Soviet Union.

By the time we invaded Normandy, the Soviet Union was close to advancing into Poland and were routing the German army at every turn.  The reason we had total air superiority during the invasion and afterwards was because the majority of the remaining Luftwaffe planes were fighting desperately to slow the Soviet advance and were substantially outnumbered on both fronts.

All of this does not minimize in any way the sacrifices of the brave soldiers at Normandy.  But how much more poignant and fairer would it be for the brave survivors of the Soviet WWII army to stand together with their allied brethren at Normandy and recognize the common struggle that all humanity wages against despotism and evil, and the fact that war is to be avoided at all costs.

Perhaps it would even be the first step toward a deeper understanding of the US/Russian relationship, based on history and a shared vision of a peaceful and cooperative future.