It’s been 80 years, today, since some of the bravest men ever to walk the Earth stormed ashore on the beaches of Normandy. Too many of them fell on the beaches and in the country past the beachhead, but they went on to liberate France and, along with the Red Army pushing in from the east, put an end to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.
No matter what designs others may have on the month of June, June 6th is and forever will be those men’s day. For men they were, men of courage and fortitude; they were scared, they were worried, but they had a job to do, and so they waded ashore and took a beach while seeing death all around them; they faced an implacable enemy that fought like demons, and the men of the Normandy landings pushed inwards and drove them back — drove them to defeat. Among them were farm boys from Iowa and Nebraska, ranch hands from Texas and Montana, city boys from Boston and New York, boys from California to Maine, Florida to Washington, and they faced what most of us can’t possibly imagine and yet went ashore and took that beach away from one of the most advanced, capable military forces of their time. At their sides were our allies: men from Manitoba, British Columbia, Quebec, the Maritimes; men from London, Leeds, Aberdeen, and Southhampton. The free world was there that day, in force, to take Europe back from Hitler’s iron grip.
On that day, the plan did not unfold without hitches. The paratroopers, men of the 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions, who were to take vital bridges and crossroads, jumped in the night before, after flying into France under heavy anti-aircraft fire in unarmed, unarmored C-47s —and promptly got scattered to the four winds. Officers went from place to place, gathering what men they could find, regardless of their units, and moved on to their objectives. Author Stephen Ambrose, writing of that day later, noted that the paratroopers of the famed Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry, 101st Airborne, had a cogent observation:
‘Hitler made only one big mistake when he built his Atlantic Wall,’ the paratroopers liked to say. ‘He forgot to put a roof on it.’
On the beach, under the withering fire from the Germans, the landing craft came ashore in the wrong places, but wherever they landed, they knew the enemy was in front of them, so they carried on: Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., deputy commander of the 4th Infantry and son of President Theodore Roosevelt, on realizing they had been dropped in the wrong spot on the beach, remarked to his men :
“We’ll start the war from right here.”
He rallied his men and moved them inland.
In the British sector, on Juno Beach, Leading Aircraftman David Teacher was fighting his way ashore with the No. 71 Royal Air Force Beach Unit. He later described what he saw that morning:
Jerry started to shell the beach at about 9am. Suddenly, all hell let loose. The beach was under fire from shells, mortars and machine guns, we dived for cover. The sea was covered in blood and vomit and flies began to arrive by the thousands, which created another nightmare … We continued all night and the following day without a break. Slowly, slowly we overcame all the nightmares .There was no lack of humour. A soldier coming ashore asked, ‘Is this a private beach? I was promised a private beach. If not I am not staying.’ And we heard, ‘My mother told me not to travel by air, she thought it was much safer by sea.’ An army officer came ashore and instead of getting his men off the beach quickly, he stopped to consult his map. I approached him, ‘Sir, off this beach, now!’ ‘And who are you?’ he asked. ‘Sorry, no time for introductions.’
All along that blood-soaked Normandy coast, the men moved in. With rifles and machine guns, with flamethrowers and grenades, with fixed bayonets, they moved on the German positions and, one by one, took them out. They did so at enormous cost, but they had a job to do, and it was done.
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These were men of iron courage, all possessed of the great will to see the job done, and they won through.
On seeing the Allied invasion force moving in on the beaches, one of the enemy soldiers, Major Werner Pluskat of the 352nd Infantry, understood very clearly what was happening. He said:
This is the end for Germany.
He was right. It was the end, not for Germany, although that nation would go through decades of dissolution and partial Communist rule for decades after the war; but it was the end for Hitler’s Third Reich, and throughout human history, few regimes have ever been brought to a more richly-deserved end.
Famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle came ashore on Omaha Beach late in the day on June 6th; he wrote:
By the time we got here the beaches had been taken and the fighting had moved a couple of miles inland. All that remained on the beach was some sniping and artillery fire, and the occasional startling blast of a mine geysering brown sand into the air. That plus a gigantic and pitiful litter of wreckage along miles of shoreline.
Submerged tanks and overturned boats and burned trucks and shell-shattered jeeps and sad little personal belongings were strewn all over these bitter sands. That plus the bodies of soldiers lying in rows covered with blankets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in a line as though on drill. And other bodies, uncollected, still sprawling grotesquely in the sand or half hidden by the high grass beyond the beach.
That plus an intense, grim determination of work-weary men to get this chaotic beach organized and get all the vital supplies and the reinforcements moving more rapidly over it from the stacked-up ships standing in droves out to sea.
And famed war photographer Robert Capa also spoke on the moment, on Omaha Beach:
This is a very serious business.
Mr. Capa had a gift for understatement, it seems.
Remember these men, for men they were, regardless of age — and it’s important to note that men as young as 17 came ashore that day. Remember what they did for us. They waded ashore, and they faced machine guns and artillery, snipers, and mines, but they had a job to do. They pushed forward, at times walking bent at the waist like men walking into a strong wind, which they were — a wind consisting of bullets and artillery fragments — and they took the beach, and went on to take France and liberate Europe, and the world today is as it is because of them. June 6th will always and forever be their day.