A LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel) from the U.S. Coast Guard-manned USS Samuel Chase disembarks troops of the U.S. Army’s First Division on the morning of June 6, 1944, (D-Day) at Omaha Beach, France. (Photo by Chief Photographer’s Mate (CPHOM) Robert F. Sargent, U.S. Coast Guard)
Eighty years ago this week the epic invasion of Allied air and ground forces swept across the Normandy peninsula to help defeat Adolf Hitler and his German war machine during World War II.
A battle of more than 150,000 Allied troops, who fought on the beaches and in the hedgerows, D-Day launched June 6, 1944, and remains immortalized in books, movies and television shows—and in the sacred cemeteries on the French coast.
Alan Allport
For all its magnitude, the battle didn’t decide the outcome of the war, as German forces were already weakening in the face of the Soviet army on the Eastern Front, says Professor Alan Allport, the Dr. Walter Montgomery and Marian Gruber Professor of History in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
However, D-Day and its strategic importance finally gained Allied forces their footing in Europe and had long-lasting implications for a Western Europe free from communism and enduring American international diplomacy, says Allport, who is the author of “Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War 1938-1941” (Knopf, North America).
In this Q&A with SU News, Allport further explains the significance of D-Day and its impact generations later. For any media who wish to schedule an interview with Allport, please reach out to Vanessa Marquette, media relations specialist, at vrmarque@syr.edu.
There were at least two ways in which the “D-Day” we know of might not have taken place. One would have been if the Allies had decided in 1944 to devote the resources of Operation Overlord somewhere other than in an invasion of northwestern France. For instance, the British tended to favor using Overlord’s soldiers, tanks, planes and ships in the Mediterranean instead to continue the advance up the Italian peninsula or to invade the Balkans. It’s impossible to say how differently the war might have ended had this been done (it could have been faster, it could have been slower!) but in the event the British conceded to the Americans that they would invade Normandy instead.
The Allied armada on Omaha Beach (Photo courtesy of The National WWII Museum)
Another way D-Day might not have happened would have been if the Allies had devoted more resources to the strategic bombing campaign against Germany. The commander of the British strategic bombing forces, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, was convinced that with enough aircraft and with the assistance of the Americans he could bomb Germany to a standstill over the winter of 1943-44 so that a ground invasion of France the following spring would be unnecessary. Again, we have no way of knowing for certain what would have happened had he got his way, because in the end he never received the number of planes he thought necessary for a war-winning blow. Airpower was important to victory in Europe, but it was not by itself decisive.
If D-Day had failed or had never been attempted it’s arguable that World War II in Europe would have ended with a German defeat anyway because by spring 1944 the Axis forces on the Eastern Front were clearly in retreat in the face of the growing power of Josef Stalin’s Red Army. However, the war might have taken much longer to win had the Soviet Union been fighting against the Germans alone in Europe in 1944.
Also, the map of postwar Europe might have ended up looking very different. If Stalin’s troops had reached Berlin and there had been no American, British or Canadian forces to their west then the Red Army might have carried on advancing all the way across Germany into France and the Low Countries. The USSR would have stopped at the English Channel, not the River Elbe. Western Europe, in other words, might have ended up being dominated by communist governments just as much as central and eastern Europe did in our own world.
Churchill wrote a very influential series of war memoirs in the late 1940s and early 1950s, which he used to shape the popular narrative of the war’s memory in the English-speaking world. As one can imagine, he was very sensitive to the accusation that he had been opposed to D-Day and went to great lengths to prove the opposite, claiming that he had been enthusiastic about the idea from the beginning.
Members of the 101st Airborne Infantry Division and the 4th Infantry Division crowd aboard an LCT on the way to Utah Beach, June 6, 1944. (Photo courtesy of The National WWII Museum)
As with a lot of Churchill’s postwar claims, this includes an element of truth but also some mythmaking. Churchill was certainly correct to say that earlier in the war (in 1942 and early 1943) he had been quite open to the idea of a cross-channel attack. And once D-Day finally took place in June 1944 he fully supported the campaign.
However, there was definitely a period in late 1943 and early 1944 when he was lukewarm at best about the idea. Churchill had come to believe that D-Day would cost too many Allied lives and that the resources for the invasion would be better used in supporting the campaign of Italy. He was unhappy about being overruled on the matter by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Stalin, and right up to the final hours before the invasion privately confessed his fear that the invasion beaches would be red with the blood of fallen Allied troops. Fortunately in the event his anxieties were exaggerated and D-Day succeeded with a relatively small loss of Allied lives.
Normandy American Cemetery (Photo by Vanessa Marquette)
D-Day did not decide the outcome of the war—that had already been decided for some time by spring 1944—but it did help to decide what the postwar map of Europe would look like. It represented the moment when American ground troops became the dominant force in the western European war, outnumbering finally the forces of Great Britain and its Commonwealth and Empire.
The campaign in France in 1944 was the last occasion in which the U.S. Army fought the main body of a first-class enemy force with weapons and equipment at least as technologically advanced as its own (more advanced, arguably, in some cases). So it could be said that 1944 was the last time in which the U.S. military was truly tested in a major conventional war. The fact that World War II ended with an indisputable Allied victory and that it was at least to some extent a “good war” with clearly defined heroes and villains has obviously helped to ensure its lasting popularity too.
“Les Braves” memorial sculpture at Omaha Beach (Photo by Vanessa Marquette)
In World War I, American ground forces fought in France in the final year of the conflict, but after the peace treaty was signed, the U.S. troops returned across the Atlantic and did not retain garrisons in western Europe to aid in regional security. For a variety of reasons World War II ended differently. U.S. forces remained in western Europe, eventually as part of the NATO alliance. That alliance continues to be a lynchpin of American international diplomacy. So it could be argued that on the morning American soldiers made footfall on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, they began a commitment to western Europe, which perseveres to this day, 80 years later.
