D-Day: the young person’s guide to the best and worst in humanity - and a warning for Ukraine today

This week, dozens of Heads of State will descend on Normandy’s beaches to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D–Day landings. The moment when 150,000 allied troops stormed onto mainland Europe to drive the Wehrmacht out of France and the Benelux but also by opening a second front to take the pressure off the Soviet armies moving against Nazi Germany from the east. President Biden and President Zelensky are due to attend the commemoration along with the usual cohort of leaders from NATO and EU countries. These big gatherings, marking each decennial since June 1944, have become a ritual in the diplomatic calendar and useful for some behind the scenes negotiations. A decade ago, France and Germany used the occasion and the theme of reconciliation between bitter adversaries to launch a “Normandy Format”, together with the Presidents of Russia and Ukraine. It was a valiant attempt to bridge Russian-Ukrainian differences over the secessionist areas of eastern Ukraine inhabited by Russian speakers but, as we have seen from the most recent conflict to blight the European continent, ultimately an exercise in futility.  

This year will probably be the last when the D–Day commemoration will be a full scale political event. Saluting the courage of the soldiers from 13 allied nations who landed on the five Normandy beaches on 6 June 1944 and the days thereafter makes far less sense when none of the veterans are still alive and able to make the journey to France to receive the tributes. Those still alive are now well into their upper nineties or have even passed the 100 milestone. It is all very different today from the 40th anniversary in 1984 when rows of veterans listened to the memorable speech by President Ronald Reagan which explored the reasons and beliefs propelling the US Rangers up the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc to silence the German machine gun posts. For Reagan, it was a faith in human dignity and democracy, a sense of something greater than the self, which explained the acceptance of sacrifice. Valour did not come only from military discipline or a feeling of obligation towards one’s comrades exposed to the same fate but also, more essentially, from the sense of a cause that justified the risk. It would exact a heavy price to be borne stoically. A soldier would be lucky and dodge the bullet or unlucky. That was really the only thing to ponder.  

There is also a time in the aftermath of great historical events when they become too distant to speak meaningfully to the present and begin to slip away into the past. Dry facts and chronologies in history books replace debates over their relevance to our present-day predicaments and any lessons they may offer us. What gives this particular D-Day commemoration its significance is the fact that the promise of D-Day– to liberate Europeans from the scourge of totalitarian rule and restore the freedom of nations – was only partially met. Despite issuing a Declaration on a Liberated Europe the allied powers were unable to keep their promises regarding free elections or the restoration of pre-war territories and national borders. Eighty years later a totalitarian European state is still trying to impose its will on a democratic but weaker neighbour and using some of the same brutal methods that characterised the Nazi occupation of Europe from 1938 to 1945, as well as the Soviet imperium in central and eastern Europe from 1944 to 1990. The millions of Europeans displaced by the Second World War or soldiers taken prisoner were forced to live in squalid camps and only resettled-at home or in foreign lands – in the mid-1950s. So although D–Day was a daring and successful military operation that helped bring the war to an end by forcing Germany’s unconditional surrender on 7 May 1945 it was less successful as a political project to inspire resistance forces across Europe to rise up against their totalitarian oppressors and regain control over their national destinies. The liberating armies crossing France after June 1944 did not march on to Prague, Warsaw, Budapest or Tallinn but stopped at Torgau on the Elbe and even retreated in Germany and Austria to allow Moscow to occupy its pre-designated sectors. When the resistance rose up prematurely in anticipation of imminent liberation from Nazi rule, it was often brutally repressed with tragic and considerable loss of life, as happened to the French Maquis fighters on the Vercors plateau or the Polish Home Army launching its uprising in Warsaw with Soviet troops close by on the other side of the Vistula. Eighty years on, the Russian aggression against Ukraine and Russian interference in Moldova, Georgia, Belarus and other places to seize more territory or prop up unsavoury dictators underline just how much-unfinished business the democracies still need to do.  

Yet even if D–Day came at a heavy price, both on the first day of the landing when 9,000 allied soldiers were killed or wounded and years later in the 40–year division of Europe, it is still worth recalling today because of what it still has to teach us about the extremes of human experience and about the best and worst of humanity. This is, tragically, what wars produce.  

We can still learn from history if it is properly analysed, as Sophocles does in his play Oedipus Rex, where Queen Jocasta tells us that in a time of plague and strife, a sensible man should judge the new times by the past. So let’s try to do just this.  

On the more positive side of the ledger, the Normandy landings were a triumph of careful planning and human ingenuity. Amphibious operations against well defended coastlines were always considered to be hazardous, with no more than a 50/50 chance of success. The Gallipoli landings in 1915, seeking to open a second front in the First World War, were a costly failure that almost sunk the career of Winston Churchill and durably alienated Australia from the British Empire after the ANZAC troops suffered the bulk of the casualties. The Dieppe raid in 1942 was a fiasco, although it produced valuable lessons in how not to try to land on the Channel coast, which was factored into the D-Day planning. The latter by contrast was the right balance between strategy, meticulous planning and well-resourced implementation. The UK and US military staffs worked for two years to plan D-Day, first in a country house by the sea at Largs in Scotland and then, under the direct supervision of General Eisenhower, in a suite at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Troops, weapons and enormous stocks of supplies were built up in Dorset and Hampshire. Over 7,000 ships and landing craft were assembled and prepared to ferry the troops and material across the Channel. Engineers worked on the best design for the landing craft and built the floating pontoons, or Mulberries, which were positioned off the Normandy coast and allowed troops and supplies to be off-loaded as close to the beaches as possible. There were landing rehearsals as well, although the USExercise Tiger at Slapton Sands in Devon in April 1944 went tragically wrong, with over 1,000 US Army and Navy personnel being killed, mostly by drowning. Still, Eisenhower and his team pressed on. Meteorologists analysed the Channel weather and the tides in painstaking detail, looking for the window of the calm sea that would allow for a crossing. Combined air forces flew 14,000 sorties to cover the landings, and 18,000 paratroopers were dropped behind enemy lines to sabotage German supplies and communications and make it harder for German reinforcements to get to the beaches. An entirely fictitious US First Army was set up in Kent to deceive the Germans, defending their Atlantic Wall in the Pas–de–Calais, into believing that the Allied invasion was coming over the shortest sea route of the Straits of Dover. Military trucks drove up and down the lanes of Kent day and night and phoney radio communications and dummy tanks were used to create the impression of a big military buildup. Fortunately for the Allies, General Rommel,appointed by Hitler to defend the French coast, was taken in and kept the bulk of the German armoured forces in northern France leaving the Normandy coastline only lightly defended and by older soldiers recovering from the Russian front. Had Rommel woken up earlier to what was going on and sent his Panzer and Tiger tank divisions west faster D-Day might have had a very different outcome, with the liberation of Europe postponed by years and the Soviet Union potentially in control of far greater swathes of territory or even concluding a peace with Hitler’s regime. So even the most meticulously planned operations need a stroke of good fortune. Yet, on the other hand, if there are no great human enterprises, good or bad fortune does not matter at all.   

When we look at the situation in Ukraine today and the gap between Western support for Ukraine and the arms, equipment and finance that Ukraine is actually receiving, a D-Day level of effort would be no bad thing. Of course, we are not talking about Western troops fighting Russians or driving them directly out of Ukraine as the Allies drove the German army out of France, Belgium and the Netherlands between June 1944 and May 1945. But in terms of an integrated military command with one overall person in charge and taking the day–to–day decisions, the massive logistics and training operations and the commandeering of resources and land, sea and air assets across the Atlantic, together with the intense planning and lessons learned feedback loop, a D-Day style organisation with senior military personnel overseeing the effort could be a game changer. It could keep Ukraine in the fight and eventually help it to prevail. The current ad hoc arrangement divided up between different international organisations (NATO, EU, G7 etc) and informal multinational groups (like the Ukraine Support Group or the Czech-led consortium to procure 155 mm artillery shells) is not fit for purpose in securing the right resources and the right type of weapons at the right moment, in the right quantities and with the right conditions of use to enable the Ukrainian forces to block Russian advances and go back on the offensive themselves. One idea for the upcoming NATO Summit in Washington in July is to place all this planning, coordinating and supply chain activity under NATO, which has the big bureaucracy and procurement agencies to run such a show. It could help to standardise and maintain all the different types of weapons Ukraine is receiving and help train and equip the new conscript army that Ukraine urgently needs. Mobilising to the full the permanent NATO civilian and military headquarters and expertise is not another D-Day, but it would be a step changer.  

This is all the more necessary when we consider a second key lesson of D-Day, which is that it is very rare and difficult for countries under foreign military occupation to liberate themselves without outside intervention. After the liberation of France, General de Gaulle was keen to talk up the role of the Free French forces under General Leclerc in being the first to arrive In Paris in August 1944. But they rode in US supplied Sherman tanks and used US equipment and logistics. Eisenhower halted the US advance to allow French forces to enter Paris, recognising the value of this gesture to restore French national pride. De Gaulle, anxious to re-establish the central authority of the French state, played down the contribution of the Resistance, much of which was dominated by the Communists. But the Resistance leaders, staking their claim to be part of the debate on France’s future, played up their contribution in standing up to the German occupying forces and their Vichy police and Milice (French militia) partners. Yet virtually all the prominent historians of the Resistance movements agree that the Resistance, no matter how courageous its fighters, played only a secondary role in weakening the Wehrmacht and helping the Allied advance. The groups had been consistently infiltrated by the Gestapo; betrayals and double agents were legendary, and the Germans inflicted savage reprisals against French civilians after acts of sabotage by the Resistance, which deterred the groups from carrying out further moves. When the Resistance did carry out an uprising on the Vercors plateau in the spring of 1944, it was quickly suppressed by armoured German units, leading to hundreds of deaths among the lightly armed French fighters. The Resistance only proved of military significance once D-Day had taken place and the allied forces were attempting to break out of their Normandy bridgehead towards Brittany, Paris and the Low Countries. The groups provided valuable intelligence on German troop movements, blew up railway lines and locomotives and harassed the SS Das Reich division as it moved from southern France towards Normandy. But in no way was the Resistance able to prevent the German divisions from retreating from France intact and in good order. Like the other parts of occupied Europe, France owed its liberation to the invasion of foreign armies. The main difference is that these invaders were benign in Western Europe and malign in Eastern Europe.  

What is the lesson from Ukraine here? Again, it is not that Western armies need to stage a counter-invasion of the country to support the domestic Ukrainian resistance and drive out the Russians. It is more to stress that the Ukrainians, no matter how plucky and innovative, will not be able to liberate their country by their own means and efforts alone. The crucial variable will be the engagement of foreign governments and their militaries. For instance putting more Western specialist troops into Ukraine, as President Macron has proposed, to conduct training, help to repair damaged equipment, assist Ukraine with electronic warfare or run military hospitals. Foreign governments also need to review their red lines when it comes to permitting Kyiv to use Western supplied weapons against targets in Russia, provided that these targets are associated with Russia’s military operations against Ukraine. As the country which has suffered an unprovoked attack, Ukraine is perfectly within its right to do this but countries like Germany and Italy have still been hesitant. In recent days, the US has thankfully lifted some of its previous restrictions on the use of US-supplied artillery to allow Ukraine to strike Russian staging posts over the border near the city of Kharkiv. However D-Day was not about caution and half measures but the willingness to take great but calculated risks to achieve an absolutely essential aim: the defeat and destruction of the Nazi regime. Is stopping Russia from destroying Ukraine and threatening Western security and democracy worth a similar effort? And the acceptance of higher risk for higher gain?  

Once D-Day had proved to be successful and hundreds of thousands of allied soldiers poured into France through the liberated Channel ports, Europeans hoped for imminent freedom. But the war dragged on for another year before Hitler committed his cowardly suicide in the Berlin bunker and his designated successors accepted unconditional surrender at Reims on 7 May 1945. The German army regrouped and even counter-attacked in the Ardennes. Despite a rapid Allied advance into the Netherlands, the failure of Operation Market Garden to seize the Dutch bridges over the Rhine condemned the Dutch population in the north and east of the country to suffer Nazi reprisals (and avoid starvation during the bitter “turnip winter”of 1944) right up to the war’s end. Denmark and Norway endured a similar wait, and in Yugoslavia, Ukraine and the Baltic states, fighting continued into 1946 as various resistance groups opposed the rule of their new masters. After D-Day, and given the rapid advance of Soviet troops into Central and Eastern Europe in their Operation Bagration, it was clear that Germany had lost the war. It was time to stop the bloodshed. But Hitler fought on against all rationality with the result that more people were killed in 1945, when the war’s outcome was no longer in doubt than in the four previous years of the conflict. As the Germans understood that they were losing, they became even more brutal: accelerating the Holocaust and the death marches of the camp inmates towards Germany, massacring French resistance leaders in Caen jail, razing Warsaw to the ground and using weapons of mass destruction like the V2 rocket in the vain hope of turning the tide. Hitler even ordered his generals to blow up the historic buildings of Paris before they retreated, but fortunately, fearing Allied retribution more than the Gestapo, they ignored the order. But all the same lots of critical infrastructure, like ports, bridges and factories, was destroyed by the German army in a scorched earth policy as it headed back towards the German frontiers. The end of the Nazi regime underscored that tyrants and dictators do not “go quietly into that dark night”(to quote Dylan Thomas) and, in a final act of Gotterdammerung, are ready to pull their countries and their neighbours down with them. Compromise or recognising reality is not their forte. Only the fact of military defeat can make them reverse course, or make their accomplices finally turn against them. In his final testament, written in the bunker, Hitler even blamed the German people for not being strong and ruthless enough to realise his demonic vision of the Herrenvolk.  

If we extend this analogy to today’s Russia, Putin is not Hitler. But he has employed many of the same methods in Ukraine. Attacking an independent country, invoking trumped up charges of the mistreatment of an ethnic minority. Exactly what the Nazis did vis–a–vis Czechoslovakia in March 1939. The deliberate bombardment of civilians and civilian targets and using terror tactics to forcibly displace civilians from their homes. Building an empire through the forced incorporation of ethnic Russian communities into the mother country, the deportation of civilian populations including children to change the demographics of entire regions, deliberate damage to the environment and to critical infrastructure, the use of food as a weapon and the disregard of the Geneva Conventions in the mistreatment of prisoners of war and the summary executions of soldiers and civilians in occupied areas. The analogies with the Nazis are rife. If Putin wins the war in Ukraine we can guess at the retribution that he will inflict on all the brave Ukrainians, from Zelensky downwards. If he loses and is forced to leave Ukraine, we can also guess that at the final spasm of destruction, he will mete out to push Ukraine’s recovery as far back as possible. As Russia is a nuclear power which threatens the use of nuclear weapons ever more frequently and has no shame in raining thousands of drones and missiles down on Ukrainian cities the endgame could be potentially catastrophic for Ukraine, as it was for the occupied countries and Germany itself in 1945.  

So a central challenge for the Western supporters of Ukraine is to devise a strategy to deter Russia from these scorched earth tactics while making Ukraine ever more resilient to survive them. But, as the aftermath of D-Day showed, wars are not won by one single battle or one brilliantly executed campaign but by a long and grinding struggle of attrition in which victory goes to the side that perseveres best and longest. And dictators who are desperate do desperate things. Yet even if the Kaiser in 1918 escaped an international criminal tribunal as Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels did in 1945, and Germany did not pay significant reparations to repair war damage after either the First or Second Year Wars, this time round there is a permanent international criminal tribunal in The Hague (which has already indicted Putin) and action in the US, G7 and the EU to confiscate frozen Russian assets to help to fund Ukraine’s army and rebuild the country. Yet the defeat of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan in the Second World War, and their subsequent occupation by allied forces, helped to turn them into Western democracies and eventually military allies. This will not happen with Russia, which, even in military defeat, will remain a threat to its neighbours and the Western democracies. But the prize of a Russian defeat will be to help Ukraine (and potentially other European neighbours of Russia) develop into secure, prosperous democracies and eventually military allies within NATO and the EU. D-Day did not liberate the whole of Europe, but at least it secured freedom and a more prosperous future for millions in Western Europe as many dictatorships collapsed, most immediately, but others (such as that of Salazar in Portugal or Franco in Spain) only over time. Yet reversing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine creates the opportunity now to complete the unification of Europe and extend the same freedoms, democracy and security right across the continent to its eastern fringes. A process that can finally achieve the enterprise that D-Day started.  

In the final analysis, the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944 was not perfect. There were many setbacks and mistakes along the way and many more casualties before the Allies arrived at the Elbe. Clearly, the 13 countries that sent their soldiers to the Normandy beaches in June 1944 would have hoped to prevail faster and at a far lower cost in lives and expenditure than was the ultimate outcome. But they paid the price because they believed –from leaders to simple soldiers– that totalitarian and racist regimes enslaving whole populations and extolling the culture of war and violence had to be defeated if the heritage of centuries of Western civilisation building was not to be destroyed. It is that fundamental conviction and the effort that flowed from it which is the message that D-Day sends to us across the eight decades since the landings on Omaha, Sword and Juno beaches.  

This article is part of our European Elections #Voices4Choices campaign. Find out more here. The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.