A Few Quotes on D-Day
Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of D-Day. In honor of that monumental event, I want to share some of the best quotes I've found while reading The Guns at Last Light.
The book tells the story of the D-Day invasion and the ensuing campaign in Europe. If you want to learn more about WWII, this is an excellent—albeit dense—read.
Operation Overlord (the D-Day invasion & battle of Normandy) was the culmination of years of planning. Here's why it took years:
"For Overlord, the U.S. Army had accumulated 301,000 vehicles, 1,800 train locomotives, 20,000 rail cars, 2.6 million small arms, 2,700 artillery pieces, 300,000 telephone poles, and 7 million tons of gasoline, oil, and lubricants."
But what about the written plan to coordinate the people and equipment?
"The U.S. First Army battle plan for Overlord contained more words than Gone With the Wind."
The planning was incredible, but even with this much planning, there were plenty of disastrous oversights.
"American planners knew that marshlands behind the sea dunes had been flooded with two to four feet of water by German engineers...to isolate any invaders arriving on the coastline...Planners did not know enemy inundations were in fact far more ambitious...German occupiers closed some floodgates and opened others, allowing tidal surges to create an inland sea ten miles long and up to ten feet deep...No one was more surprised than the many flailing paratroopers who, upon arriving over the coast of France, had removed their life vests in the airplane bays only to be pulled to brackish graves by their heavy kit."
But despite many mistakes, the Allies were positioned for success. They were facing a weaker, worse supplied German enemy.
"[German] Air Fleet Three, responsible for western France, had just 319 serviceable planes facing nearly 13,000 Allied aircraft; on D-Day, they would fly one sortie for every thirty-seven flown by their adversaries."
Rommel had warned of the disaster of an Allied invasion weeks before it happened:
"'If we can't throw the enemy into the sea within twenty-four hours,' he told officers in Normandy, 'then that will be the beginning of the end.'"
When he got word of the invasion, he remarked with fear:
"If I was commander of the Allied forces right now, I could finish off the war in fourteen days."
As we know, it took much longer than 14 days, but I was surprised to hear Rommel's candid comment.
I was also surprised at the number of civilian casualties.
"All told, three thousand Normans would be killed on June 6 and 7 by bombs, naval shells, and other insults to mortality; they joined fifteen thousand French civilians already dead from months of bombardment before the invasion."
"'Liberation,' wrote the journalist Alan Moorehead, 'usually meant excessive hardship for the first few months.'"
Collateral damage is—and always has been—an inevitable consequence of war.
But none fare worse than the men who fight it.
"'I shall never forget that beach,' Corporal William Preston, who had come ashore at dawn in an amphibious tank, wrote to his family in New York. Nor would he forget one dead soldier in particular who caught his eye.
'I wonder about him,' Preston added. 'What were his plans never to be fulfilled, what fate brought him to that spot at that moment? Who was waiting for him at home?'"
Eighty years after D-Day, few of the veterans are still alive.
The best way to honor their memories and sacrifices is to learn what happened, remember what happened, and appreciate what we have because it happened.
