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D-Day:What It Meant

CHARLES CAWTHON

The author of this selection offers a brilliant and highly original discussion of the globalsignificance of the American and British invasion of Normandy, in German-occupiedFrance, on June 6, 1944. But his stunning thesis needs to be placed in the larger con-text of the Second World War, both at home in America and at the battlefronts. Thewar brought unprecedented unity at home, as Americans of all colors and conditions ral-lied behind a righteous crusade against Japanese, German, and Italian aggression. In thecourse of this terrible war, 16 million Americans, including 300,000 women and960,000 African Americans, served in the armed forces. But compared with the destruc-tion wrought in China, Japan, the Soviet Union, and Europe, where some 49 millionpeople died and whole cities were flattened, the United States suffered relatively light casualties. There were no invasions of the American mainland, no bombing raids onAmerican cities, no civilian massacres. Far fewer Americans died in the Second WorldWar than in the Civil War. Total American military deaths came to 408,000. Bycontrast, 2.2 million Chinese and from 20 to 25 million Soviets — soldiers and civil-ians alike — perished in this, the largest and deadliest war in human history. Such fig-ures do not include the 6 million Jews exterminated by the Germans in the holocaust.

Despite relatively light casualties, the United States underwent profound changes dur-ing the war. With the government pumping billions of dollars into war production, fullemployment returned and the Great Depression finally ended. Americans savoredwartime prosperity — weekly earnings of industrial workers alone rose 70 percent be-tween 1940 and 1945 — and they endured food rationing and shortages of cigarettesand nylon stockings. In addition to producing a surge of national unity, the war crushedpowerful isolationist sentiment in Congress and centralized even more power in Wash-

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ington, D.C., where multiplying war agencies issued directives, devised complicatedforms and schedules, and produced veritable blizzards of paper.

The war was also a crucial event for American women. In a zealous display of patrio-tism, they joined the Red Cross, drove ambulances, worked for the civil defense, and en-listed in the armed services. Women were also recruited for their brains. The navy choseselect graduates of seven East Coast women’s colleges to participate in military operationsthat were highly classified; five such women, from Goucher College, were involved intop-secret “Operation ULTRA,” which broke the Germans’ U-boat code. Because oflabor shortages, the government in 1942 urged women to join the wartime work force,and 4.5 million did so. They flocked to Washington, D.C., to work as secretaries andtypists in the government’s mushrooming bureaucracy. They also donned slacks, coveredtheir hair, and went to work in the defense plants. There they did every kind of job fromclerking in toolrooms to operating cranes, welding, and riveting — in short, they per-formed the kind of physically demanding work once reserved for men. “Rosie the Riv-eter” became a famous wartime image, one that symbolized the growing importance ofthe female industrial worker. The story of “Rosie the Riveter” is ably documented in afilm by the same name.

In the Pacific theater, meanwhile, the United States lost the Philippines, Guam, andWake Island to imperial Japanese forces, and faced an even more formidable enemy inAdolf Hitler’s Germany. Although America was already in a condition of semimobi-lization in December 1941, it took a year before the country was ready to fight a totalwar on two fronts. What happened in the Pacific theater will be covered in the next sec-tion. As for Germany and Italy, the first American move against them took place inNovember 1942, when an American expeditionary army landed in North Africa andwent on to help the British whip German and Italian forces there. After that, an Anglo-American force captured Sicily and invaded the Italian mainland.

Then on D-day, June 6, 1944, an Allied invasion force — the largest ever assem-bled — landed at Normandy in what turned out to be the beginning of the end ofHitler’s so-called Third Reich. Thanks to German errors and Allied planning and exe-cution under General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the invasion was a success. With a footholdin Normandy, American, British, and French armies drove a wedge into German defensesand poured inland. As the Western Allies pushed toward Germany from the west, Sovietarmies drove in from the east. By May 1945 — less than a year after D-day — Germanresistance has collapsed and the once mighty Reich was a smoldering ruin.

This sets the stage for the following selection by Charles Cawthon, a veteran of the Sec-ond World War and an expert on the military side of the conflict. It is the thesis of his essaythat D-day was one of those great battles that changed history, marking “the final, pivotalpoint” in America’s often hesitant march to global power. He compares D-day to other piv-otal battles, such as the Greek victory over the Persians at Marathon and the American vic-

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tory over the British at Saratoga, and goes on to offer a brilliant discussion of how D-daywas a turning point in the grand events leading up to the Second World War and in therise of the United States as a superpower, “looked to by the rest of the world for leadershipand resources to solve the humanitarian problems and disease and famine.” For the imagi-native, Cawthon even speculates on what might have happened had the Allies been de-feated on the beaches and cliffs of Normandy. This is state-of-the art military history.

GLOSSARY

BRADLEY, GENERAL OMAR Commander ofAmerican ground forces on D-day.

CHURCHILL, WINSTON British primeminister during World War II who worked closelywith Franklin Roosevelt in shaping the war policiesof the Western Allies.

BALKANS Countries on the Balkan Peninsula insouthern Europe, comprising Yugoslavia, Rumania,Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, and the European part ofTurkey.

CREASY, SIR EDWARD British militaryhistorian whose text, Fifteen Decisive Battles of theWorld (1851), advanced the thesis that decisivebattles shaped human civilization and history.

EASTERN FRONT The German-Soviet fightingfront, which in June 1944 stretched from the tip ofGreece northward to the tip of Finland.

OMAHA BEACH The heaviest fighting on D-day took place on this beach, one of four beacheson which American, British, and Canadian forceslanded on D-day.

V-1 AND V-2 German ballistic missiles that cameinto use in 1944. These revolutionary, unmannedrockets enabled Germany to bomb Britain withoutthe use of airplanes.

WESTERN FRONT The fighting front betweenGermany and the Western Allies in France.

A conjecture, worthy of a certainty, is that noAmerican soldier on Omaha Beach at highnoon, June 6, 1944, gave thought to being

present at a turning point in world history. Any ab-stract thinking he may have done was more likelyalong the lines of being in a major debacle. TheEnglish Channel to his back, his weapons fouled bysaltwater and sand, he was largely naked before anenemy firing down from trenches and massive con-crete bunkers along high bluffs looming to his im-mediate front. Fortunately for his mission, if of nocomfort to his person, his allies invading Europe bysea and air along some fifty miles of less forbiddingNormandy coast were in better straits.

Their battle is popularly known as D-day. Theirmission was to break through the German coastaldefenses and secure a lodgment area in Normandyfor the mustering of the armed might of the WesternAllies, then assembled in England. This accom-plished, they were to attack and destroy the Germanarmies in Western Europe and, in concert with theforces of the Soviet Union, advancing from the east,invade Germany and destroy the Nazi regime thathad held most of Europe in bondage and terror overthe past five years.

Charles Cawthon, “D-day: The Beginning of America’s March toGlobal Power,” originally titled “D-Day: What It Meant,” Amer-ican Heritage, vol. 45, no. 3 (May/June 1994), pp. 49–50, 52, 54,56, 58. Reprinted by permission of American Heritage Inc. 1994.

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This generalized American soldier’s lack of interestin history at the darkest moment of his travail is un-derstandable. In the end, of course, he prevailed onOmaha and, with his allies, secured the lodgment.This done, the ultimate success of the mission becameas much a given as war ever affords. Costly battles thatfollowed in Normandy, at Arnhem, and in Ardennesdelayed but could not halt the Allied armies that con-tinued to grow in strength, while those in their foessteadily eroded without hope or recovery. By any sortof reasoning, the D-day victory was decisive to vic-tory in Western Europe.

Now, fifty years later, a clearer perspective of thisvictory shows that it not only was decisive in a the-ater of operations of a long-ago war but can also bestrongly argued as the decisive turning point inAmerica’s long, hesitant march to the peak of powerin a world of vast change in its every human aspect:political, social, economic. This perspective is sup-ported by an abundance of recorded history. Thebattle and the blind avalanche of events leading to itare exhaustively documented. The half-century sinceis also minutely recorded; for many it is within livingmemory. For the first time, much of it has been

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The American soldiers, having left their landing barge, had to

wade ashore under fire to reach the Normandy coast. The goal of

the D-Day invasion, writes Charles Cawthon, “was to break

through the German coastal defenses and secure a lodgment area

in Normandy for the mustering of the armed might of the Western

allies.” (Brown Brothers)

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under the electronic eye of television. Unfortunately— as with the written word — this inherently impar-tial eye can be manipulated to blink selectively. Intime, however, the decisive direction of historyemerges from these encumbrances with distinct clar-ity. Just so, from the varied records of this centuryemerges the trace of America’s sometimes reluctantmarch to global power, with June 6, 1944, as itsfinal, pivotal point.

No such perspective is now available on America’stenure in power or on the uses it will make of it, foron time’s long calendar it is a position just assumed.Apart from its effectiveness in serving American in-terests in the Gulf War and its limitations and dan-gers in serving European interests in the Balkans andin serving humanitarian interests in Somalia, therecord is blank, as only the pages of history yet to beenacted can be blank. The sole certainty is that thishistory, when enacted, will bear the imprint of whatthe late Barbara Tuchman identified as the “Un-known Variable . . . namely man.” Over time thisvariable has demonstrated a strong proclivity towardillogical and unpredictable behavior — a trait mademore confusing by frequent infusions of acts of senseand conscience.

So, this future of America as the global super-power is best left to its uncharted devices. There isno existing tool for determining its course. There is atool, however, for examining the voluminous recordsurrounding D-day as the pivotal point in this marchto power. It is best to stipulate that this tool is notthe computer. Its astounding capabilities are invalu-able, but it cannot, of course, solve problems involv-ing tumultuous human emotions. At present thehuman stuff, the pulse, of history can be cipheredonly by us humans, using humanly conceived criteriaagainst which to measure actions and events; an in-exact tool, but our own.

The criteria by which I measure the place of D-day in the unending parade of world history werepropounded by Sir Edward S. Creasy, a noted nine-teenth-century historian and jurist, in his classic

study Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World. This work,first published in 1851, was followed in quick suc-cession by five more editions over the next threeyears and frequent reprints since. It has been studiedby generations of historians and read for pleasure byeven more history buffs. The criteria are as I extractthem from the text of the preface of the first edition.Their prose style is of his period; their content hasstood up remarkably well to the test of time and dis-sent; I know of none better:

“They [the fifteen battles] have for us an abidingand actual interest, both while we investigate thechain of causes and effects, by which they havehelped to make us what we are; and also while wespeculate on what we probably should have been, ifany one of those battles had come to a different ter-mination.” Concerning battle causes and effects: “Ispeak of the obvious and important agency of onefact upon another, and not of remote and fancifullyinfinitesimal influences.” He discards fatalism and in-evitability as factors in history but recognizes “thedesign of the Designer” in human affairs. In some-thing of an aside, he notes: “I need hardly remarkthat it is not the number of killed and wounded in abattle that determines its general historical impor-tance.”

Pursuant to his criteria and method, he named thevictory of the Greeks over the Persians on the Plainof Marathon (490 B.C.) as the first truly decisive bat-tle in world history, because it ensured that the“whole future progress of human civilization” wouldstem from Greece, not from Persia. Among the greatarmed conflicts of the era, he wrote, to Marathonalone can be traced the spirit that “secured formankind the treasures of Athens, the growth of freeinstitutions, the liberal enlightenment of the westernworld and the gradual ascendancy for many ages ofthe great principles of European civilization.”

Continuing up to his own time, he judged onlyfourteen other battles of like decisiveness in shapinghis nineteenth-century world, with which, with the

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British Empire as its superpower, he seemed quitecontent.

Thirteenth on his list is the American ContinentalArmy’s defeat of the British at Saratoga (1777). In hisopinion, this victory decided the outcome of theRevolution, making possible the founding of theAmerican Republic. He observed, with some awe,that the American citizen had in two centuries and ahalf “acquired ampler dominion then the Romangained in ten [centuries].” To Britain, France, andRussia — the great powers of his day — he added“the great commonwealth of the western continent,which now commands the admiration of mankind.”

Sir Edward did not venture far into predictions onthe future of this “great commonwealth.” Perhapshis judicial experience made him wary of guessing athuman directions. He did, however, quote at lengththe predictions of his noted contemporary Tocque-ville, the brilliant firsthand French observer of theAmerican phenomenon. Tocqueville’s predictionswere not modest. He was emphatic that nothingcould halt America’s growth and power. His predic-tions about the limits of America’s territorial andpopulation expansion were quickly overtaken andpassed, but his basic premise has proven sound.

America’s potential as a world power was first putto the test in World War I. Entry into the war en-sured the Allies’ victory and secured a voice in thepolitical squabbling that followed. Disillusioned bythe cost of a war that yielded such obviously danger-ous and desolate results, popular American opinionforced the return to an aloof position in world af-fairs; frequent reference was made to PresidentWashington’s warning against foreign entangle-ments. Then, with no military threat from any quar-ter, the country reduced its formidable wartimeforces to negligible size and, in the heady postwarboom, turned to creating domestic problems, princi-pally the devastating economic depression of the1930’s.

The world war of the 1940’s, which incidentallyended the Depression, was the most critical test of

national character since the American Revolutionand the Civil War. From the Revolution came thenation; from the Civil War, a firmly united nation;from World War II, a nation that was one of twodominant world powers. The almost immediateconfrontation that followed with the Soviet Union,the other power, developed into the long and costlyCold War. (Veterans of Korea and Vietnam canrightly call this title an oxymoron.) Americaemerged from that grueling test, which included theperiod of raucous and violent dissent over Vietnam,as victor and undisputed king of World PowerMountain. This distinction seems to rouse no greatoutpouring of national pride, because, perhaps, thereality of it reveals responsibilities that are onerous,homage that is given grudgingly and usually alongwith demands, blame that exceeds glory, and coststhat impinge upon serious domestic needs. A thicknational skin and a cool, unblinking eye appear es-sential to the holder of global power.

To speculate on how Sir Edward Creasy mightmeasure D-day against his criteria would be grosslypresumptuous and might disturb his rest. I apply hiscriteria and method as I interpret them, nothingmore.

I have noted that the “causes and effects” leadingto D-day and afterward are extensively and variouslyrecorded. From the generally agreed-upon hard factsin this record — not upon “remote and fancifully in-finitesimal influences,” which Sir Edward disdained— it stands out as the time when and place whereAmerican leadership of the Western Allies was un-equivocally asserted. This was a mantle bestowed notas a generous gesture but for the preponderance ofAmerican manpower and matériel committed to thebattle.

Equally significant, American industry in 1944 wasnot only arming and supplying its own forces aroundthe world but also producing more than 25 percentof the armament of its Allies. This imbalance was togrow. Britain, after five years of total war effort, had

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reached the limits of its resources. From the invasionon, it would at best maintain its forces at their D-daylevels while American forces in the theater grewuntil by the time victory was declared in Europe,U.S. ground forces were some three times greaterthan those of all its Western Allies combined.

This shift in the balance of power in the militarystructure of the Western Allies was drastic. In hind-sight it represented the descent of Britain from, andthe rise of America to, the top rank of world power.When the Western Alliance was first formed, afterPearl Harbor, Britain was the senior partner as far asforces in being were concerned. It was bearing alonethe air battle over its isles and Germany, the groundwar in North Africa, the submarine warfare in theAtlantic, and the war against Japan in the Pacific andAsia. All this while American forces and war industrywere in the hectic stage of coming on stream.

This disparity in forces confronting the enemy wasrapidly closed; by the eve of D-day, thirty monthslater, the American commitment of forces worldwidewas predominant. Outwardly, Britain’s equality in thepartnership was maintained; actually, it had ceased toexist. In the war councils American insistence that theinvasion be in 1944 overrode British reluctance to riskwhat its leadership knew would be the last great effortBritain could mount. (In justice, once committed tothe invasion, Britain, under the drive of Prime Minis-ter Churchill, held back nothing. It risked all.) As tothe Supreme Command of the Allied invasion, noquestion arose: It would be American.

(A strong case has been made that there have beennot two separate world wars in this century but onewar interrupted by a twenty-year intermission for re-furbishing armaments and antagonisms. With only aslight adjustment in thinking, the Cold War can beincluded as a third phase of this one war, making,overall, a conflict covering three-quarters of a cen-tury — in length somewhere between the ThirtyYears’ War of the seventeenth century and the Hun-dred Years’ War of the fourteenth and fifteenth cen-turies, if that be a distinction to cherish.)

History never seems to repeat itself in any exactsense: The close of World War I found America fac-ing no military threat; World War II ended with theimmediate threat of a Soviet Union bound for worlddomination. The price of aloofness here was disaster;America had to continue leadership and support ofwhat was now called the Free World.

The Soviet Union was unable to sustain this longconflict of sometimes open warfare and always ofworldwide clandestine war. When the Communistpolitical and economic structure collapsed in 1989,the Soviet Union dissolved into deeply troubledcomponent parts; the mighty Soviet military ma-chine, including its nuclear weapons, was left at dan-gerous loose ends.

The breakup of colonial empires into independentnations brought freedom for them to engage in tribal,ethnic, and religious wars conducted by a new raft ofruthless tyrants. America, as the superpower, is lookedto by the rest of the world for leadership and resourcesto solve the humanitarian problems of disease andfamine that are always the camp followers of suchwars. Also in this correctional field is the United Na-tions, a cumbersome organization with a mixedrecord of effectiveness. There is an uncertain relation-ship between America’s responsibilities, by reason ofnational strength, and those of the United Nations.Once again, great nations do not have small problems.

This troublesome picture has a brighter side that isoften obscured by the hurly-burly of the everydayworld: the century’s two major tyrannies, Nazi Ger-many and Communist Soviet Union, have beenbroken, though their doctrines and practices con-tinue to surface in various hate groups. And I find nocredible denial that with American leadership, free-dom has a better chance of surviving and growing inthe world today than at any time in history. Whilethis leadership is not pro bono in its purest form, it is ahistoric departure from the tradition that territorialacquisition and economic gain are legitimate spoilsof power.

Sir Edward Creasy decreed that the historical

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stature of a battle must be judged not only on thebasis of victory that helped “make us what we are”but also on the basis of “what we probably shouldhave been” had it been lost. He correctly tags thislatter process as speculation, not always a productiveexercise. “What if ” and “if only” applied to historyare something on the order of trying to prove a neg-ative. This may be harmless, ego-stroking exercisewhen practiced privately, but an irritant when imposed upon others. Sir Edward therefore insistedthat the speculation he considered necessary to hismethod be within the bounds of “human probabili-ties only,” a porous restraint but helpful. In dealingwith human affairs, one must use any tool available.

That D-day could have been an Allied defeat withfar-reaching consequences was a decidedly humanprobability. The generalized American soldier whowas left, at the start of this essay, caught in the sham-bles of death and destruction on Omaha Beachwould have been justified in thinking that the battlethere had been lost. This thought also plagued Gen.Omar Bradley, commanding the American groundforces. In his autobiography General Bradley wrotethat from reports he received around midday of thecarnage of Omaha, he had to believe that the assaultthere “had suffered an irreversible catastrophe.” Hewrote that at the time he privately considered shift-ing further landings to the American Utah Beach onthe right and the British beaches on the left. Later inthe afternoon, with reports of the attack moving in-land, he gave no more thought to evacuating Omaha.

The “what ifs” of a lost Omaha are all ominous:an attempt to evacuate under fire would have beenmore costly in landing craft and casualties than theinitial assault. Shifting the troops and equipment ofthe entire Army corps destined for Omaha to otherbeaches that were already crowded would haveraised confusion to the level of chaos. A Germancounterattack, which never came, would have ac-complished the same havoc as an ordered with-drawal. The loss of Omaha would have left a gap of

some twenty miles between Utah and the Britishbeaches.

The German high command was slow in identify-ing the June 6 assault as the Allies’ main effort and inassembling the first-class panzer and infantry divisionsthat it had available to contain and repulse it. Even so,it is highly unlikely that the gap in the Allies’ linewould not have been quickly discovered and ex-ploited to flank the adjoining beachheads. As it was,with Omaha Beach won, the situation of the Allies re-mained serious. Attacks beyond the beachheads werebrought to a slow and bloody crawl by stiff resistancein the difficult hedgerow terrain. The British objec-tive of taking the important communications centerof Caen on the first day was not accomplished until sixweeks later. General Bradley observed in his autobi-ography that had Hitler launched the forces he hadavailable within the first week of the invasion, “hemight well have overwhelmed us.”

The “human probability” that D-day could haveended as a Dunkirk, or as did the amphibious assaulton Gallipoli in the First World War, is too real to bedisregarded. Had it happened, Pandora, that well-known packager and purveyor of disasters, wouldhave had a memorable day. The immediate militaryill would have been the reduction of Germany’sthree-front land war to two fronts. Then the majorpart of their sixty-one divisions, including elevenpanzer, stationed in France and the Low Countries,could have been shifted with small risk to both theEastern Front confronting the Soviet Union andItaly confronting the Western Allies.

The Eastern Front stretched at the time from thetip of Finland south to the tip of Greece, well awayfrom Germany’s eastern border. In Italy the Allieshad taken Rome but were faced with continuing theslow, costly attacks up the mountainous spine of theApennines.

Even with the major reinforcements made avail-able by repulse of the invasion, it is unlikely that theGerman Army could have repeated its great offen-sives of the early war. But that it could have stale-

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mated both fronts is a probability well within thehuman range.

Churchill, before the invasion, called it “much the greatest thing we have ever attempted.” Defeatwould have been crushing to Britain, in both mili-tary losses and morale. America would have madegood its own losses but would have had to brace fora longer, more costly war, and largely alone. The ef-fect on Germany, of course, would have been a re-vival of faith in Hitler. It would also have providedtime to produce new weapons that would have haddramatic effect on the war right up to its final excla-mation point: the atomic bomb. On D-day thisbomb was some fourteen months away from its firstappointment in Hiroshima.

Time is more of the essence in war than in anyother destructive endeavor. Given fourteen months,Hitler’s Germany would certainly have been intomass production of the jet plane, ballistic missiles ca-pable of wreaking great damage on Britain, andground-to-air missiles that could destroy bombers bytracking the heat from their engines

These were not really “secret” weapons. Alliedintelligence knew of them and sought to destroytheir development and production sites by heavybombings, none of which was entirely successful. InBritain and in America the jet engine was in devel-opment, but not up to the German stage of produc-tion. Shortly after D-day the first rocket missiles, theV-1, were launched against England. Had theirlaunching sites not been overrun by the invasion, theV-1 and the much more advanced V-2 would havedone incalculable damage to British industry andmorale. Forereach in weapons systems has changedthe course of battles and of wars.

One of the more tragic consequences of a D-daydefeat would have been the time given the Nazis tocomplete the Holocaust and to destroy the Resis-tance movement in occupied Europe. With thelaunching of the invasion, the Resistance was sig-naled to begin large-scale sabotage of German com-

munications. With the Resistance so exposed, Ger-man retaliation would have been swift and brutal.To rebuild the movement would have been slowand difficult. The thousands of additional lives lost inan extended Holocaust can be calculated; the effecton the establishment of Israel cannot.

That the war could have been ended by the assas-sination of Hitler is a human probability supportedby the prior attempts on his life. That in a stalematedwar it could have been ended between Germany andRussia by an accommodation reached betweenHitler and Stalin is supported only by the recognizedobsession of each dictator with staying in power, re-gardless of what was required to do so. This, how-ever, runs off the scale of human probabilities.

Then there was the atomic bomb.The two bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945

ended the war in Asia and the Pacific. This was a warthat Japan could not have won, but it could have ex-acted a terrible price had defeat required an invasion.

That Germany would also have been targeted forthe bomb is a human probability of the highestorder. (In terms of death and destruction, the con-ventional bombing of Dresden in February 1945 wason the scale of that visited on Hiroshima some sixmonths later.) To speculate on the response of Hitlerto a threat of the bomb requires probing an exceed-ingly dark mind. He might have seen this new orderof flame, smoke, and concussion as a Götterdäm-merung scene fitting for his departure. I speculate nofurther than that. One way or another, the bombwould have ended the war in Europe.

Again, these are projections of things that neverhappened, of situations that never developed. Thereis no certain knowledge of what course historywould have taken had the Persians won atMarathon, the British at Saratoga, or Napoleon atWaterloo, other than that in each instance oppres-sion would have had a further run. And there is nocertainty of the aftermath of a Nazi German victoryon D-day, other than that it would have been fol-

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lowed by at least fourteen months of dark andbloody deeds that would have left an even more ter-rible scar on what we call civilization.

If we set aside probabilities, these, in sum, are therecorded facts: that D-day was won by the WesternAllies; that it was fought at American insistence, withan American as supreme commander; that the mostcritical and hard-fought sector of the battle —Omaha Beach — was won by Americans againstheavy odds imposed by terrain and enemy strength;and that from this battle to the end of the war,American preponderance in men and matériel con-tinued to grow, and with it grew American influ-ence and leadership in the Western Alliance. Thispattern continued throughout the Cold War, the de-mands of survival denying any discharge from it.

From all this there emerges one overriding result:World leadership now rests upon the shoulders of afree people, committed to democracy — this at alevel not equaled since the time of the Athenians andMarathon. It is a decisive turn in history; D-day isthe pivotal point upon which this turn was made.

At nightfall after the Battle of Valmy (1792), inwhich the French revolutionary forces turned backPrussian and Austrian invaders, the poet Goethe,who was there, was asked by some dejected Prussianswhat he concluded from the defeat. “From thisplace,” he said, “and from this day forth commencesa new era in the world’s history; and you can say youwere present at its birth.”

It would not be amiss to address these words to allwho fought the D-day battle on the coast of Nor-mandy on June 6, 1944.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 What were Sir Edward Creasy’s criteria for de-termining a great battle that changed history? Whydoes the author of this selection, Charles Cawthon,believe that D-day fits Creasy’s criteria? What wasthe historical significance of D-day?

2 What does Cawthon mean by a shift in the bal-ance of power among the Western Allies? Whathappened on Omaha Beach? Why was it vital to D-day’s success? To what other decisive battles mightD-day be compared?

3 Cawthon discusses a “what if ” — the “humanprobability” of what might have happened had theAllies been defeated at Normandy. What, in hisjudgment, would have been the “far-reaching conse-quences” of an Allied defeat? What terrible newweapon might the Allies have dropped to end thewar in Europe? Do you think that such conjectureson the basis of “human probability” are worthwhile?

4 Cawthon argues that an Allied defeat on D-daywould have given Germany time to employ severaldecisive new weapons. What were these? Whatwould they have accomplished?

5 What was the difference between the close of theFirst World War and the Second World War? Whattwo major tyrannies of the twentieth century havebeen broken? What political system do most coun-tries of the world want to emulate?

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