Nigel Cawthorne - Fighting Them on the Beaches: The D-Day Landings: June 6, 1944

This edition published in 2011 by Arcturus Publishing Limited
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ISBN: 978-1-84858-427-3
AD000188EN

Edited by Paul Whittle
Cover & book design by Alex Ingr
Maps by Alex Ingr and Simon Towey
Cover images Robert Hunt Library

J OSEPH STALIN, the Soviet leader during World War II, said of the Allied landing in Normandy of 6 June 1944, 'The history of war does not know of an undertaking comparable to it for breadth of conception, grandeur of scale and mastery of execution.' Indeed, the D-Day landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944 were the biggest seaborne invasion in history. After years of training and meticulous planning, a vast army of British, American, Canadian, French and Polish troops along with German Jews and other 'enemy aliens' who had fled from the Nazis prepared to storm the heavily defended beaches of Normandy, and over a million men would be joined in one of Europe's largest set-piece battles in an area that is now full of tourist sights and holiday homes.

On the outcome hung the future of Europe, if not the world. For more than four years, the German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and his Italian sidekick, the Fascist Benito Mussolini, had held most of Continental Europe in their iron grip. Now Allied troops sought to lift that yoke.

It would be no easy task. The Germans knew the Allies were coming and built huge defences known as the Atlantic wall to protect 'Fortress Europe'. Many of the senior Allied officers planning the invasion had witnessed the terrible loss of life that had taken place in northern France during the First World War, which had ended only twenty-six years before. Although the Germans had been defeated by Anglo-American forces in North Africa and were being pushed back in Italy and eastern Europe, they were well-trained and well-equipped, and early in the war they had won considerable victories against what they considered to be weak and decadent democracies.

But, although slow to rouse, the democracies had considerable advantages when they went to war. Their leaders did not seek to coerce their troops into fighting, but rather to inspire them. John F. Kennedy said that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill 'mobilised the English language and sent it into battle'. For millions all over the world he articulated what the war was all about. On the other side of the Atlantic, American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was also an inspiring figure. He had already brought his country through the Great Depression. Even though the American people had been reluctant to be drawn into the war in Europe, once it was inevitable the American people trusted Roosevelt to win it.

Both leaders made it clear that their war aims were not conquest. They expressed no desire to seize territory or enslave people. Even before the US joined the war, they had issued a joint declaration called the Atlantic Charter. It stated that neither nation sought any aggrandisement from the conflict. Neither wanted to make territorial changes without the free assent of the peoples involved. They asserted the right of every people to choose their own form of government, and they wanted sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who had been forcibly deprived of them. After the destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they would seek a peace under which all nations could live safely within their boundaries and seek to disarm potential aggressors. The Atlantic Charter even spoke of promoting equal access for all states to trade and to raw materials and worldwide collaboration to improve labour standards, economic progress and social security. The Charter was later incorporated into the Declaration of the United Nations.

The troops who landed on the D-Day beaches were familiar with the aggressive nature of Germany and Italy. They would have seen newsreels of the dictators coming to power, heard their belligerent oratory and seen their goose-stepping rallies. They would have seen Italy invading Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) and the Germans trying out their Blitzkrieg tactics in the Spanish Civil War. Germany had gone on to make repeated territorial demands before its armies swept across the Continent. In the days before television, newsreels showed shattered cities and terrified civilians and, nightly, American radio broadcasts vividly described the German bombing of London.

The Nazi maltreatment of the Jews was also well known, though the attempted extermination of the entire race was not known generally until the liberation of the death camps in 1945. But the young men who hit the beaches on 6 June 1944 knew very well what they were fighting against. Few doubted that Hitler and his Nazi regime were an unspeakable evil and many of them gave their lives to destroy it.

They would have been gratified to know that their sacrifice was honoured over fifty-five years later, though they would have been puzzled that we described the events of 6 June as D-Day. In military parlance, the starting date of any military operation is D-Day, just as the time it starts is always known as H-Hour. But that convenient designation has now come to stand for much more than just one more date on the military calendar. D-Day, 6 June 1944, now stands alone as one of the most crucial days in history.

THE SECOND WORLD WAR had started in 1939, ostensibly over the German invasion of Poland. Its origins lay in Germany's humiliating defeat in the First World War in 1918. The Versailles Treaty concluding the war imposed crippling reparations on Germany. These led to an economic collapse, creating a political vacuum that allowed Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party to seize power. Determined to make Germany strong again, Hitler began to re-arm and made a number of territorial demands which the democratic nations, ill-prepared for war, were forced to grant.

In Hitler's political manifesto Mein Kampf, he talked of Germany's need to expand to the east. In early 1939, Hitler decided to seize Poland, but there was a danger that this would prompt the Soviet Union Communist Russia and its satellites to come to the defence of its western neighbour. So in August 1939, Hitler concluded a GermanSoviet Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet leader Stalin. In a secret protocol, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to divide Poland between them. On 1 September 1939, the German army rolled over the border into Poland, and Britain and France, who had military treaties with Poland, declared war.

There was little that the Allies could do for Poland, which was crushed in a month. The Germans then turned westwards. First Norway was seized. The German army then swept through Holland, Belgium and France in a matter of weeks. The British had sent an Expeditionary Force which found itself surrounded and it had to be evacuated from Dunkirk in early June. Fascist Italy, under Benito Mussolini, declared war on Britain and France on 10 June 1940. Paris fell on 14 June and an armistice between Germany and France was signed on 22 June, although sporadic guerrilla warfare was continued by the French Resistance, or