The D-Day landings in Normandy 60 years ago will live on as an enduring symbol of freedom and bravery, writes Kevin Myers.
June 6th, 1944, and at last a serious reckoning between freedom and tyranny was about to begin. Nor was the tyranny Nazi alone. For the virus of Marxist totalitarianism which first erupted in St Petersburg in 1917 proved to be the greatest human calamity since the Black Death. Within five years Soviet Communism had consumed the old Tsarist empire; within another 10 years, the concept of state totalitarianism had spread to Germany, mutated, and produced the Third Reich. Borne on the wind of an alliance of convenience, and hybridised with indigenous strains of barbarism, the virus had then seized Japan. Italy, Spain and Portugal produced their own peculiar forms of the disease. China, Korea and Vietnam were busy incubating fresh variants.
Thus 60 years ago, most of the Eurasian continent and its attendant islands were in thrall to totalitarian dictatorships, run by secret police - the Gestapo, the NKVD and, across the Japanese empire, the Kempeitai. The scale of these conjoined empires of despotism was vast, their northern borders running from the North Cape of Norway along the Arctic Circle to the Bering Strait, while their southern meridian marched from the Bay of Biscay all the way to New Guinea and the Great Barrier Reef, upon Australia's northern shore.
Hopes for world freedom now resided in the peripheral, anglophone societies of the United Kingdom, its empire and commonwealth, and most of all, its former colony, the United States. In the history of humankind, there has never been such a contest between two sets of values: between common-law societies of the English-speaking peoples against an entire continent of totalitarian regimes and their hundreds of millions of slaves.
Yet in all truth, only the perspective of history allows us see the truth of that first week in June, 1944 - that this contest was one of world freedom on the one hand and all the toxins of global totalitarianism on the other. For the concessions made by Churchill and Roosevelt at Teheran in 1943 had effectively ceded eastern Europe to Stalin. No one then really suspected how dark the night would be which would soon fall on the countries east of the Oder and the Elbe, and for the decades ahead, for, of course, it was the immediate future which filled every waking and sleeping moment of the Allied commanders, 60 years ago.
The architect of the D-Day landings was Bernard Law Montgomery, a conceited little bantam cock of a man, a pedantic master of detail, a man who engaged affection and fury in equal measure. Socially he was inept, almost autistic. When the Prime Minister's wife Clementine Churchill told Montgomery's aide that it was time to change for dinner, Montgomery interrupted her. "That won't be necessary. I never dine with my ADC." Lady Churchill, incredulous, replied: "Who are you to tell me whom I entertain in my house! Captain Chevasse is my guest and will dine with us." His manners aside, Montgomery was the master of the set-piece battle, and D-Day turned out to be his greatest triumph. It was an encounter with his oldest adversary, Erwin Rommel, whom he had frequently outgunned and outfought, but never before out-thought. But in Normandy, finally, he did.
Rommel assumed that the Allies would make their landings at high tide, to spare the advancing infantry prolonged exposure to defensive fire. So his primary beach defences would be underwater at high-tide, and largely consisted of mines on frames, to blow the landing craft up before they could reach the shore. Montgomery's plan was to avoid these defences by landing at low-tide, and push armour forward to deal with the defences before the infantry would follow and advance inland.
Hindsight allows us to contemplate this project with equanimity. There was little enough in the souls of those who planned the assault. Churchill himself had been responsible for two calamitous landings, at Gallipoli in 1915 and Narvik in 1940, which had ended in defeat and ignominious evacuation. Two landings in Italy not long before, against largely unprepared defences at Salerno and Anzio, had been near-disasters. So, the auguries were not good, and were made worse as D-Day, June 5th, approached and the fine summer weather of recent days gave way to tempests and high seas. Suddenly, the landings were simply impossible. The Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower, postponed them.
By this time, colossal aerial efforts had gone into subduing the German defences, and at a terrible price: 2,000 aircraft and 12,000 aircrew had been lost over France preparing for D-Day within the past two months alone. Now it seemed as if the invasion force of 6,483 vessels and nearly 16,000 aircraft would have to be stood down for at least two weeks, playing havoc with morale, organisation and time-tables. However, weather forecasters spotted a break in the bad weather, and while Eisenhower ordered the invasion to go ahead, one day late, Rommel, without proper forecasts of Atlantic weather systems, assumed the weather was going to stay bad, and rushed back to Germany for his wife's 50th birthday. The greatest mistake of his life.
But of course, war favours the general who makes fewest mistakes. The decision to go was sounder than anyone knew: the next possible day, and by that time an obligatory date, June 19th, was to experience the worst storms in channel history, and which would have destroyed the invasion fleet. There lies a sobering thought indeed. However, where the Allies did blunder was to focus too much on the landings, and not plan properly for the aftermath. This not merely affected operations, almost fatally, but equally, has coloured much of popular perception thereafter - that somehow or other, the D-Day landings made victory inevitable, and fighting in France was quite different from that of the Great War.
Not so. Just as the planners for the Somme in 1916 gravely underestimated the defensive qualities of the German barbed wire, the Allied planners in 1944 catastrophically failed to appreciate the defensive military value of the high Normandy hedgerows, the bocage. These restricted visibility enormously, effectively nullifying Allied superiority in matériel and in the air, and made fighting conditions almost totally unrelated to the training the invaders had undergone in Britain.
So, D-Day did not provide a First Day on the Somme, as Churchill had dreaded: instead of the 20,000 dead that he had at one time feared, British casualties - including wounded and missing on the day - totalled just 3,000. But for each day thereafter, the fighting was every bit as intense and bloody as it had been in Picardy a generation before. Allied losses in the Battle for Normandy in the summer of 1944 were of Great War proportions - 425,000 killed, wounded and missing, roughly double the German losses in killed and injured.
Yet this truth does not detract from the heroic achievements of the soldiers, seamen and airmen of D-Day, but adds to them. The men who on June 6th forced their way past the German defences on those now-famous beaches, or who landed by glider and parachute in the orchards and the pastures beyond, were to spend the summer fighting there. In that deadly bocage country, rifle companies that were built up over years were within a few days destroyed, and replacements would arrive from other cannibalised units, were re-badged and sent into battle, often to die namelessly amongst complete strangers. It is a melancholy tale of dogged bravery as unrelenting as anything the Western front can show.
War is a blunt instrument. Perhaps twenty thousand French civilians were killed by Allied bombers, and 400,000 buildings destroyed or seriously damaged. Armies of Norman refugees fanned out across France, leaving their dead behind them. After USAAF bombers blasted American positions, killing and wounding 500, the air force rejected army complaints, insisting that the stray bombs were within the normal expectancy of errors. In other words, buster, that's war.
That's war indeed. The 12th (Hitlerjugend) SS Division, which made its entrance on the battlefield late on D-Day, was a truly abominable force, and foreshadowed the methods of modern zealots. Under the awesomely terrible General Klaus Meyer, at 34 the youngest German divisional commander of the war, it routinely murdered its prisoners - mostly Canadian - by tying them to trees and cutting their throats. Some SS soldiers would strap on explosive charges and blow themselves up beside British tanks.
In all this slaughter, perhaps the key event, and a reminder what this was all about, occurred at Caen prison the morning of June 6th: 87 suspected members of the Resistance were taken out and summarily shot, almost in retaliation for the landings.
Thus June 6th lives on, and properly, in the imagination of the world as a symbol of freedom, when thousands of men closed with the Normandy coast, vomiting with sea-sickness and terror, not knowing how many minutes they had to live.
Opposite Omaha beach, the special floating tanks designed to reduce the German concrete fortifications were swamped by cross-currents, and sank. What steel should have done would now have to be done with human flesh, and was, but at a cost of 5,000 casualties. In some small towns in Pennsylvania, from which were recruited so many men of the 29th Division who had perished in the landings, almost every family lost a relative or friend on the narrow sands of Omaha.
In Ireland, too, over the coming days, sheepish telegram boys would be delivering the British War Office telegrams, though certain post offices delegated this dreadful duty to local clergymen. 100,000 Irishmen, from north and south, had joined the British army, including two thirds of the Irish Army of 1939, and many participated in the landings. The Royal Ulster Rifles was the only British regiment that had two battalions in the landings, one glider-borne, one on the beaches, and the 9th Independent Parachute Battalion that landed early on D-Day morning was based largely on Irish volunteers.
Perhaps the most distinguished individual Irish contribution on the day was provided by Captain Redmond Cunningham from Waterford. The son of John Redmond's election agent, he had volunteered as a dedicated anti-Nazi, and now led a troop of Royal Engineer tanks in the first-wave assault on German fortifications. Mines blew up two of his four vehicles. Looking for a replacement tank, he went along the water's edge on foot, while all around him mines were exploding, men were being killed, and mortar bombs were landing. He returned to his own tank, only for that too to be blown up.
Then, still on foot, he led the survivors of his men to clear a dense minefield, containing mines every eighteen inches. They spent four hours doing this, under fire. Next, equipped with fresh tanks, he led the remains of his troop forward against enemy positions, eventually causing the surrender of 900 Germans. That night he drove alone into Caen and, finding no Allied soldiers there, turned back. He was the last British soldier to enter Caen for more than a month, and thousands would die trying to make the attempt.
Redmond Cunningham, the only Irishman to win an MC on D-Day, was thus a participant in the first encounter in a Eurasian land war that, hot and cold, was to last another 45 years. Initially the foe was Nazism; yet its kindred creed, communism, soon took its place in the totalitarian line of battle against freedom, this time from behind the Iron Curtain it erected in its newly-gained territories. It was confronted remorselessly by the economic might and military deterrence of the US, until victory was finally won in 1989, and Redmond was alive to see it.
The primary price in Normandy 60 years ago was paid by ordinary people, invisible men drawn from invisible civilian lives to fight an evil whose depth was beyond all civilised imagining. Such plain men, volunteers all, were crew in a Royal Canadian Air Force Lancaster bomber on operations in support of Allied troops in Normandy, which was attacked and set on fire by a German fighter. The skipper gave the order to abandon ship.
As he was about to bail out of the doomed aircraft, Flying Officer Andrew Minarski, in peacetime a furrier from Winnipeg, looked through the flames engulfing the fuselage and saw that the tail gunner, Patrick Brophy, was trapped in his jammed gun turret. Instead of jumping, Andrew Minarski fought his way through the inferno, and desperately but unsuccessfully tried to swivel the turret to release the gunner. As he struggled, he caught fire. Finally, aflame from head to foot, he stood up, gave a warrior's farewell salute to Brophy, and jumped to his death. Moments later, the Lancaster hit the ground and exploded, throwing young Brophy and the other crew members clear. All, miraculously, survived. As an allegory for the fight to clear Eurasia of arbitrary murder and death camps, this tale of a Canadian-Pole nobly giving his life trying to save that of a Canadian-Irishman suffices.
Now, 60 years on, the ancestral homelands of both men, Patrick Brophy and Andrew Minarski VC, enjoy a common freedom and a common economic purpose within a common European Union. If ever a date in world history is worth celebrating, it truly is June 6th, 1944.