D-Day heralded a new morning for Europe and the world

It is hard, where I live, to escape the invasion of Europe. From spring to autumn, Spitfires patrol the skies sporting the black and white recognition stripes that marked out Allied aircraft. They fly, now, on expensive, once-in-a-lifetime pleasure trips. 

Each year, as the D-Day anniversary approaches, all sorts of vintage aircraft rumble through Kentish skies towards the Normandy invasion grounds. Last weekend, two Dakotas in echelon, droned at low-level over my local, evocative and moving. Too easy to imagine their nervous parachutists heading for Pegasus Bridge or Sainte-Mére-Église.

And, not far from where I live, woodland paths are marked with plaques to PLUTO, the pipeline under the Channel that supplied fuel to the invasion armies and which is still in use to this day. 

It is more poignant in contrast with other things. Like the pillbox at the crossroads and another at a bend on the nearby Medway. Bricks and a Bren gun versus the panzers. Fortunately, it was The Few and the Navy between us and them.

D-Day it is, though, once again. One of the wartime moments that even us who were not there can’t help – along with Battle of Britain Day – find intensely moving in their significance. I have tried, often, both from here in Kent and standing on the beaches in Normandy to understand why. And it can be summed up in one very obvious word: “liberation”.

For all my straining at the imagination, I can’t summon an equivalent feeling to what it must have been like, after years of war, to wake and find salvation had arrived. That the boots on the street were jump boots and not jack boots; that the men on the tanks smiled.

The great World at War series dubbed its episode on the Second Front simply “Morning”. In it, a French woman does in broken English what I can’t in fluency: “Ah, we feel very happy. The best day of our lives. I think so. La plus grande joie. How you say, in English? ‘The biggest joys [sic] in our life’.” 

“And we admire those courageous soldiers. They came from so far away to liberate us,” she adds.

It is instructive that this “joy” came despite what the Allied air forces did to the Norman hinterland to rid it of German armour and stubborn points of Nazi resistance. One particularly grim fatality was the ancient abbey city of Caen. “We gave them everything,” the French lady continued. “Cider, pouf, cider. And Calvados, of course,” setting a precedent enjoyed by Anglo visitors ever since. 

Freedom. Liberation. At a high price and one we increasingly forget as our politicians haggle over defence budgets while always finding money for God knows what. 

There is, because the politics of our times demands there must be, an increasing tendency to undermine the achievement of the Western allies in their reconquest of the Continent. Despite the hard slog through the Norman bocage, Germany fell within a year and all this was based on that most difficult of military operations, an amphibious landing against a well-prepared and sophisticated defence. 

Jonathan Dimbleby has recently published Endgame: How Stalin Won the War. One hardly need be a historian to know that this is both true and contentious. True in the sense of Russia’s endless capacity to absorb military casualties and to deal in hundreds of divisions while the Western Front dealt in tens. Contentious in the circumstances of the Soviet Union’s eventual participation, the fate of Poland, the enormous efforts of the West to keep Russia in the game and the huge sapping of resources demanded of Germany to defend itself from endless Allied bombing. 

It is a bad habit to pin down the causes of victory in such a complex and global conflict in a rather glib statement, although one has to sell books and the book itself is by no means glib. Survival and victory were feats of mutual dependence and shared contribution.

What is less contentious is that what the British, American and Canadian effort implied and provided in a way Stalin never did were those two things; freedom and liberation. Of course, the gates of Auschwitz were thrown open by the Red Army in the Vistula Offensive. But thereafter? As Churchill put it shortly after the war:

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow. A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory.”

He said other things too: “From what I have seen of our Russian friends and Allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.”

It is, of course, hard as we ponder the horrors of Bloody Omaha to think that we must live in perpetual readiness to repeat it. The very idea was not to have to go through it again. But as Europe discovered then, sometimes it is not a matter of choice. 

Back though, to remembrance. There will be many televised opportunities to recall the heroism. Few will be more moving than the final scenes of Saving Private Ryan. Few more remarkable than the oddity of Richard Todd – who actually fought at Pegasus Bridge – playing the man who led the assault in The Longest Day. “Mortality was an issue at the time.” he later choked out in an interview. And none more harrowing than Fury, Brad Pitt’s Sherman crew battling from the beaches to Berlin. 

Watch ‘em all, and remember that they heralded the “morning”.

All I can say is: thank you, boys. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life