This is likely the very last major D-Day anniversary where there will be a fair amount of surviving veterans in attendance. After all, it has already been 80 years since the event. Most of them have already passed by now. Hard to imagine that many of them will survive to reach the 90th anniversary, much less the 100th anniversary.
D-Day was the biggest military invasion of the world. They had attempted it before. Indeed, over 6,000 infantry of mostly (but not exclusively) Canadians with the protection of the Royal Air Force (RAF) had attacked Dieppe, a city in northern France, in what came to be known as Operation Jubilee, or the Dieppe Raid. This was attempted on 19 August 1942, nearly two years earlier than D-Day, but obviously had very different results, as it proved to be a disaster. If anything, the fact that this military operation had been attempted, and ultimately proved to be a failure, should make us appreciate all the more the major military effort of D-Day, which finally succeeded in giving the Allies a Western Front in the European part of World War II, helping to strangle the life out of the Nazi German empire that was dominating Europe at the time.
Now, I am not one of those Americans who gloss over the sacrifices of the troops who fought to liberate Europe, on either front. For a long time, I have maintained that Americans who claim that they broke the back of Hitler and the Nazis are wrong. That is a conceit not in fact supported by history, as any examination of a military atlas documenting the war would illustrate. Indeed, the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union/Russia, and it was the Red Army that finally stopped the German military advance cold, eventually turning the Germans around from invasion to retreat. By the time of the D-Day invasion, the Germans were already in full retreat in the Eastern Front, and ultimately not just forced to back up to the borders of the Reich itself, but eventually all the way to Berlin, the capital of Nazi Germany. That was the final theater of the World War II in Europe. The Soviets beat them back, but it cost them 20 million people Nothing to overlook or minimize. I can understand the bitterness from the Russian perspective, when they hear what seems to be the de facto western point of view, that "we" defeated Hitler and Nazi Germany.
That said, we helped, and likely accelerated the process considerably. It was a noble fight against a truly evil empire that had threatened the entire world. Nazism was barbaric. Hitler had a dark mass appeal in Germany, which helped him take over. The Nazis were incredibly militaristic, bringing war and aggression across the European continent. More than that, they brought brutality on an unprecedented scale across the European continent. The Holocaust was horrific. In the East, they simply took Jews captured in villages that the Nazis took over and shot them. Even more horrible than that was the brutally bureaucratic method of systematic extermination in the death camps that the Nazis built to kill off Jews and others they labeled as undesirable.
The Allied troops sacrificed so much - too many of them sacrificed everything - to fight the Germans and help end Nazi brutality in Europe. Whenever you learn about the D-Day invasions, the degree of bravery and sacrifice is astonishing. They helped to liberate the world from Nazi brutality, and deserve to be remembered and honored, which of course is the point of this particular blog entry on my end.
So I figured that it would be worth sharing this link, with live commemorative events in Europe being broadcast.
Enjoy.
80th anniversary of D-day live updates: Commemorative events underway across Europe
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