Disturbing reports spread about the simultaneous advance and brutality of
Stalin's Red Army on the Eastern Front. Some in the American government
began to worry that a war started over freedom for Eastern Europe might end
up guaranteeing its enslavement - Stalin's storm troopers merely replacing
Hitler's.
While we were ground up in the hedgerows, in the Pacific theater thousands
of American amphibious troops were lost during the Marianas campaign. True,
we kept winning gruesome amphibious assaults, but we didn't seem to learn
much from them.
Instead, far worse carnage lay in store at places named Peleliu, Iwo Jima
and Okinawa. All these bloodbaths near the end of the war were characterized
by the sheer heroism of the American soldier - who suffered terribly from
intelligence failures and poor leadership of his superiors.
What can we learn, then, on this anniversary of the Normandy campaign?
By any historical measure, our forefathers committed as many strategic and
tactical blunders as we have in Afghanistan and Iraq - but lost tens of
thousands more Americans as a result of such errors. We worry about
emboldening Iran by going into Iraq; the Normandy generation fretted about
empowering a colossal Soviet Union.
Of course, World War II was an all-out fight for our very existence in a way
many believe the war against terror that began on 9/11 is not. Even more
would doubt that al-Qaida jihadists in Iraq pose the same threat to
civilization as the Wehrmacht did in Europe.
Nevertheless, the Normandy campaign reminds us that war is by nature
horrific, fraught with foolish error - and only won by the side that commits
the least number of mistakes. Our grandfathers knew that. So they pressed on
as best they could, convinced that they needn't be perfect, only good
enough, to win.
The American lesson of D-Day and its aftermath was how to overcome
occasional abject stupidity while never giving up in the face of an utterly
savage enemy. We need to remember that now more than ever.
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