It is a great thing that we pause today to recall and commemorate a day of sacrifice, struggle, and triumph in Normandy 79 years ago. Some 2,500 Americans lost their lives on D-Day, the costliest single day of battle in World War II.
But we should also use this commemoration to widen our perspective on D-Day and the massive combat losses that flanked it. There was a prelude of sacrifice by American and Allied forces in Europe that helped lay the framework for the invasion of France in June 1944, and here we should remember them, too. After D-Day, ten times as many American soldiers would die in the coming weeks in trying to break out from the Normandy peninsula.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower rightly told the paratroopers and shipboard troops leaving for D-Day that they were “about to embark upon the Great Crusade.” True, but it also raised the question from hundreds of thousands of other troops fighting in Italy, North Africa, in the air over Europe, at sea, and in the Pacific before June 6, 1944, of what they had been doing in the two and a half years since the U.S. joined the war.
PHOTOS: D-Day: June 6, 1944
D-Day was the fifth major amphibious operation against the Axis forces in the European Theater of Operations — preceded by landings in North Africa, Sicily, Southern Italy, and at Anzio. Between the North African landings in late 1942 and D-Day, the U.S. lost more than 18,000 in North Africa, over 20,000 fighting up the boot in Italy, and over 30,000 in the air war against Germany — where an 8th Airforce crewman prior to D-Day had a 77 percent chance of becoming a combat casualty. We should also remember some 9,000 dead from the Merchant Marine in the decisive Battle of the Atlantic — the highest proportion of casualties of any of our services.
Even so, Eisenhower was correct — D-Day was the beginning of the end and not just another operation against the Reich. It was recognized by the soldiers at the time as something terribly important. They knew, as they clambered onto the ships or the planes, that they had to win this day, at whatever cost.
Ronald Reagan famously captured the criticality of D-Day in 1984 when he delivered the “Boys of Pont du Hoc” speech penned by Peggy Noonan:
We’re here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.