D-Day - June 6, 1944 - Then and Now

By Alan Caruba

There is a cruel calculus of war. It is the number of casualties required to win. Beyond that, it is the consequences of losing.

Sixty-six years ago, on June 6, 1944, the greatest armada of ships and men laid siege to the beaches of Normandy, France, in an invasion that would put an end to the Nazi conquest of Europe.

The invasion was divided into sectors involving U.S., Canadian, and British troops, including airborne. Conservative estimates are that the U.S. alone lost 4,696. The U.K. lost 1,043. The Canadians lost 1,204. The total is 8,443 and, in general, it is believed to have been closer to 9,000.

As the battles raged on, pushing into Germany, some American troops under the Supreme Allied Command of Dwight Eisenhower came upon the Nazi concentration camps. Eisenhower ordered all possible photos to be taken and that Germans from the surrounding villages be required to see the camps and even be made to bury the dead.



In words to this effect, Eisenhower said, “Get it all on record now, get the films, get the witnesses, because somewhere down the road of history, some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”

Having previously attacked al Qaeda in Afghanistan, beginning in 2003 American and allied forces engaged in Operation Enduring Freedom, invading Iraq. Between then and now, the total American losses have been just over 4,400 while the British have lost 179 and others 139 for a total of 4,720.

In seven years of combat to create a democratic government there, the losses have been half of what was lost in the D-Day invasion.

As Eisenhower predicted, in Iran and throughout the Middle East and everywhere else that Jews are hated, the Nazi Holocaust, the deliberate killing of six million Jews, is denied.

In the past week, the doyen of the White House press corps, Helen Thomas, demanded the Israelis “go home, to Germany, to Poland.” She could have added that the Israelis return to the Arab nations they had to flee following the founding of Israel in 1948 or the Russian émigrés who fled persecution in the former Soviet Union. There are six million Jews who call Israel their home.

The Israelis are home. After an exile of 2,000 years, they returned to their home and restored their nation.

On September 11, 2001, the attack on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. took approximately 3,000 American lives.

In late May, John Brennan, the Assistant to the President and Deputy Senior Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, gave a speech in which he described the people who flew commercial airliners into those buildings and who have not stopped plotting to kill more Americans as victims of “political, economic and social forces” who should not be described in “religious terms.”

He repeated the Obama administration’s assertion that the enemy is not “terrorism”, dismissing it as a “tactic” because, he said, terrorism is “a state of mind.” Then he added that the word “jihad” should not be applied to 9/11 and the subsequent attacks such as the Fort Hood murders.

Brennan described jihad is “a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community” adding “there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women, and children.” Brennan denied the jihad that justified those murders.

Jihad has never really meant anything other than the total conquest of the world to impose Islam.

D-Day was the beginning of an epic struggle to restore and protect Western civilization against the barbarism of Nazism and every day that has passed prior to and since the establishment of Israel in 1948 has been part of this struggle, the legacy of that struggle.

Since the end of World War Two, Americans have sacrificed their lives in places like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, joining that struggle wherever freedom is challenged, wherever the barbarism of enslavement has asserted itself.

Does anyone think that the Israelis, on the frontlines of Western civilization in a barbaric region of the world, will not ultimately have to defend themselves against Iran?

That they are not now defending themselves against Turkey that has allied itself with the Palestinians who have no legitimate claim to Israel or Jerusalem, a city holy to Judaism and Christianity? Against a people who would dare to build a mosque within a short walk from ground zero in New York?

Does anyone think we should not have landed on the beaches of Normandy in 1944?

Does anyone think that freedom is not worth fighting for and even dying for?

© Alan Caruba, 2010

War! War! War!

By Alan Caruba

“In defense of our nation, a president must be a clear-eyed realist. There are limits to the smiles and scowls of diplomacy. Armies and missiles are not stopped by stiff notes of condemnation. They are held in check by strength and purpose and the promise of swift punishment.” I will tell you who said that at the end of this commentary.

D-Day, 65 years ago, was one of many days throughout history that determined the final outcome of a war. I suspect one can attach a great battle to just about every day in the calendar because the history of humanity is one of constant warfare somewhere, anywhere in the world where two men, two families, two tribes, two empires, or two or more states clashed.

The courage that Americans, joined by Canadians, British, Free French, Polish, and other troops showed on June 6, 1944 preserved freedom for a bit longer among the victors, though all of Eastern Europe had to be written off as the bribe to keep Soviet Russia involved. It would ultimately loose 20 million of its people.

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed about 199,000. People forget that the Japanese emperor and the military, though clearly defeated, refused to concede.

War is the natural element of mankind. Peace is merely the interlude between wars.

Man is the most dangerous creature on Earth and young men, in particular, are either conscripted into armies or will just as likely form gangs to fulfill the desire “to seek the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth.”

Every time I hear Barack Obama talk of diplomacy, I can hear guns being cocked or missiles being positioned. He is surely the most naïve President since the days of Woodrow Wilson who get elected promising keep the U.S. out of World War I and then, after committing U.S. troops, he went to Europe to participate in the writing of the Versailles Treaty where the British and the French ate his lunch. They divided up the spoils, punished Germany, and set in motion World War II before the ink was dry.

Wilson returned home with his dream of a League of Nations and the U.S. Senate shot it down, preferring to maintain our sovereignty than to get in bed with the knaves that started WWI.

That fool’s dream of an organization to ensure world peace was revived by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and signed into being by his successor, Harry S. Truman, who probably had little choice in the matter. Its first Secretary General was a Soviet spy named Alger Hiss, a communist who had risen high in the FDR government.

The world has always been a dangerous place because it has always been full of egotists and psychopaths who have seized or gained power in one fashion or another. Alexander tried his hand at a Macedonian empire. Rome laid down some fine roads and used them to ensure their hold on a widespread Mediterranean empire. Attila knocked on the doors of Europe. The Visigoths and other barbarian tribes sacked Rome.

The Church sent forth crusades in response to the military aspirations of Muslims to seize and hold Jerusalem, holy to Christian and Jew. The Muslims or Moors had already spread far into India and northern Africa, up into Spain. Their northern drive into Europe was stopped at Poitiers, France in 732 AD and on September 11, 1683 they were decisively defeated at the gates of Vienna.

In the last century, the Empire of Japan murdered thousands, if not millions in China while waging war to control Asia. In Europe the Nazis redefined barbarism and depravity.

War! War! War! Diplomacy is merely the process by which war may be delayed a bit and the terms of surrender are determined by the winner. Diplomacy has never stopped a despot from pursuing war. It has merely rescheduled it.

In 1986, Osama bin Laden formally declared war on the United States. He is still at war with the United States whether anyone is paying attention or not. And we are not. The Iranians, as crazed as bin Laden, have made their intentions clear by declaring “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel” every single day since seizing our diplomats in 1979 and holding them for 444 days.

After 9/11, George W. Bush did not hesitate to pursue war against bin Laden in Afghanistan and against a man, Saddam Hussein, and nation, Iraq, that were the object of dozens of useless United Nations resolutions as an instigator of wars. Obama’s response has been to denigrate our military achievement in Iraq and demand that Guantanamo be closed down.

Barack Obama is going to get a lot of Americans killed with his poetry about diplomacy.

The lessons of history are lost on this fool. Buchenwold concentration camp and the beach at Normandy are just background for “photo ops” to this greatest of narcissists. He is too busy waging his own war on America while seeking yet another stage on which to strut.

To become a nation in its own right America took on the greatest military power of its time, Great Britain, and won. It fought Barbary pirates. It waged a bloody civil war for its soul and won. It fought Mexico and added territory by winning. It fought Spain. It fought insurgents in the Philippines. It fought two world wars. It fought Communists in Korea. It fought them again in Vietnam. It forced the Russians to back off in Cuba. It fought Communists on the island of Granada and it fought a drug lord in Panama. It fought Iraq after it invaded Kuwait. It fought the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and it again fought a despot in Iraq. We are still in both these places.

On September 10, 2001 Americans thought they were not at war with anyone. They were wrong. The only thing that has kept us from another attack was the policy enunciated in the quote with which I began this contemplation of war and peace. The man who said it is former President George W. Bush. The date was November 19, 1999.