By the summer of 1944, Adolf Hitler was a victim of his own success. He had conquered so much territory, he was finding it difficult to defend it all. He was fighting the Russians in the east and fighting the Americans and British in the south as the Italians were collapsing under General Patton's tanks. If the allies were to gain a hold on what he called the "Atlantic Wall", he would be fighting a three front war. Even Hitler, the master of self delusion, knew that this would not be good.
Yet he didn't see this as a big issue. In order to overcome the astonishing amount of defenses his invasion preparation general - Erwin Rommel, the famous "Desert Fox" - had put together, it would take far more sacrifice than the British, Canadian and especially the American people could bear. Rommel had to defend thousands of miles against people he not only did not hate, but also actually admired. Not so with Hitler. "The soft underbelly of a democracy" Hitler called it. Only a fascist regime that whipped its people into a nationalistic frenzy with the fear of the fuehrer burnt into their minds could fight such a battle as was necessary to knock down the Atlantic Wall.
Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower saw it quite differently, yet he interestingly used the same concept - democracy - to describe it. It was not the "soft underbelly" of democracy that would lose the war. Quite the contrary. It was "the quiet fury of an aroused democracy" that would win it. Quietly going about doing its business, there was, to Ike, nothing that could stop a
nation ruled by its people instead of a criminal regime. And criminal is what the Germans were. Instead of Rommel's respect for his enemy, Eisenhower despised Naziism with every fiber of his being and considered it a scourge to be wiped off the face of the earth.
It would take far more space and time than I have to discuss all the going-ons that day, but 175,000 men hit that Atlantic Wall starting at twelve midnight with paratroopers behind enemy lines and an invasion force hitting the five drawn-up beaches at first loght (600 AM.) They faced scores of massive artillery, cement bunkers filled with thousands of machine guns, sharply honed wooden sticks the size of tree trunks to slow down the boats, tanks, endless mortar fire, barbed wire on top of more barbed wire all across the beaches and in the water, and perhaps a whopping one million mines of all types (triggered in different ways to make removal difficult if not impossible), also in the water in addition to the beach (where they could not be seen). Much of the German brass - especially Hitler - saw no way the allies would ever even make it
off the beach, let alone make progress into the towns.
The beaches were taken by lunch.
It came at a hideous cost - perhaps 10,000 men - but D-Day established a beach head and from that day on to the end of the war, the Germans would initiate only one offensive maneuver (known today as the Battle of the Bulge). That would come at Christmas - born of panic - and it did not succeed. On June 06, 1944, Adolf Hitler, as well as his thousand-year Reich - had about ten months to live.
Give those guys a minute or two of your thoughts this Saturday. -Ben Caplan
