Day of Days

 

The eighty-first anniversary of the Normandy invasion is upon us as I write this and will probably be gone by the time you read this because I write slowly when I choose to write at all. I suspect that there will be slightly less press coverage of the anniversary than there was last year—the press, like everyone else, is fond of a nice round number. There will be fewer veterans this year as well, the passage of time succeeding in doing what the Germans failed to do in the year between the great day and the first anniversary of the event. Very soon there will be no one left who witnessed that day and the day will pass from living memory into the realm of history, to become one with Nineveh and Tyre. Lest we forget what great things were done for us, let us remember the situation on June 6, 1944. The map below demonstrates the political situation in Europe on the morning of D-Day. On that morning, the Greater German Reich dominated continental Europe, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the eastern Soviet Union, from the Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. By June 6, 1945, the Greater German Reich, the racial empire of the Aryans that would last a thousand years, had ceased to exist, having surrendered to the Western Allies and the Soviet Union a month before. The Thousand Year Reich, gone in less than a year from the time the first Anglo-American paratrooper landed in France.