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June 06, 2006

6 June 1944: Remembering D-Day

Blackfive has a good collection of links to posts commemorating today, the 62d anniversary of D-Day.

It is difficult for us to imagine that time, even though barely more than half a century separates us from that day. Today as we fight on in Iraq and Afghanistan, our casualties are scarsely higher after four years than those we sustained in one horrible twelve-hour period on Omaha Beach. D-Day was an exercise in what is known as battlefield calculus: we knew the Germans had fortified the beaches heavily, and that there were troops ready to defend them as we came ashore. But the laws of physics guarantee that a limited number of defenders can only do so much before they are overwhelmed, and so the work of the Allies was to put enough men ashore to overwhelm the defenders. Losses were certain to be bad; men in the first wave would be slaughtered in wholesale lots. But if we put enough men ashore quickly, the Germans simply wouldn't be able to kill them all and we could establish our toehold on Festung Europa. It was nasty and brutal, but it worked, and within eleven months of the invasion, Adolf Hitler was dead and the Thousand Year Reich had fallen some 988 years shy of the mark.