It’s not always clear why we favor this over, say, the liberation of Italy from the previous year, but the landings in Normandy simply catch our imagination better. And it’d certainly be a much grimmer world if those landings had been unsuccessful. We would have to drop more atomic bombs, for one thing.
There are few living men and women left who fought for us in that war. To them and to the dead both: thank you.
Or the many, many landings done by the Marines. But that takes nothing away from the heroism of the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy. I will be watching Band of Brothers tonight.
Amazingly enough, the Army actually conducted more amphibious landings than the Marines did. Even in the Pacific.
The Allies hadn’t liberated Italy the previous year. We’d invaded Italy, and Mussolini had been deposed as a result, but the Germans quickly took control of much of the country afterwards, and we had to fight our way north, which was a slow, grinding affair. Rome only fell on June 4th, a mere two days before the landings in Normandy.
It does help to have a specific pin in the calendar to celebrate. This is really the most seminal *single* day of the war.
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And we needed something to counter Soviet posturing of “we did most of the work/casualties.”
The perfect counter to that would be to list all the many, many, MANY things we sent them through Lend-Lease. Without all that war materiel we provided, it’s not at all a stretch to say that the Soviets couldn’t have assembled the war machine that they did, as quickly as they did.
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For instance, the many thousands of Studebaker heavy trucks, which helped keep advancing Red Army advancing by letting their supply lines keep up with them, carried many of those famous Katyusha rocket batteries, and sneered at the mud rivers Soviet roads became in bad weather. This is a major contribution to the Soviet war effort in and of itself, but that’s not all they did. Because we built them, the Soviets didn’t have to, and all the materials, labor, and factories that would have been needed for the Soviets to produce them could instead be used to build other things, like those many thousands of T-34 tanks they built during the war.