D-Day 75

On this day 75 years ago the island of Britain was globally important.

Indeed, it was probably the last time that such a statement could be made with any degree of justification.

I wrote this piece a decade ago on a previous D-Day anniversary and I haven’t changed my view.

One of the most enduring tropes around WW2 is that the Irish Free State was neutral and, indeed, hostile to Britain in her hour of need.

Dublin’s stance of neutrality during what we call here “the Emergency” was as much a ruse as the deceptions around D-Day itself.

I wrote this piece in 2009 and laid out the known historical facts about the Free State’s covert role in the Allied cause throughout WW2.

My reason for writing it was to address a piece of historical illiteracy that is often espoused by the Ibrox klanbase and the fleg tribe in Norn Iron.

For D-Day itself the 26 County state played a crucial role in providing what have been called “the most important weather reports in history”.

Before the beaches of Normandy entered into history as Gold, Juno, Omaha, Sword and Utah the invasion had already begun from the sky.

Operation Tonga preceded Overlord.

Like most military operations there were hinge factors everywhere.

Many of the airborne forces were scattered across the countryside.

However, one key bridge was seized with thanks to the courage and daring precision of a Horsa glider pilot.

The skill of Staff Sergeant James Harley Wallwork DFM led to the first allied troops being on French soil for the invasion.

The British troops he had safely delivered to the battlefield had then to come to close quarters with a German tank that was counterattacking to seize back the strategically crucial bridge over the Caen Canal.

PIAT versus Panzer was the definition of suicidal bravery.

Operation Deadstick was a decisive victory and it should have set alarm bells ringing in the German High Command.

However, Hitler had taken a sleeping tablet on the night of June 5^th and couldn’t be awaked.

Consequently, the two Panzer Divisions under his direct command in France stayed put.

It was a crucial piece of luck-another hinge factor.

The deception operation for the D-Day landings would have pleased Sun Tzu.

Operation Fortitude was one of the most brilliant deceptions in military history and it was working its magic on the Führer long after D-Day itself.

However, unlike Hitler, the commander of the Atlantic Wall wasn’t fooled.

Erwin Rommel always knew it would be Normandy and not Pas-de-Calais.

When he looked at the beaches he had a flash of inspiration.

He recognised that they were identical to the beaches at Anzio and he prepared the defences accordingly.

Another stroke of luck is that Rommel himself was not at his post on the Atlantic Wall when the invasion began.

Rommel’s wife, Lucie, was born on June 6^th.

Due to the very bad weather on the Channel, on June 5th he took the opportunity to return home to Germany to see her for her Birthday. Therefore, he was not at his post when the Western Allies landed by sea and air on June 6th.

What the “Desert Fox” did not know was that thanks to the very precise metrological reports from the west of Ireland there was a weather window for the flotilla on June 6th and Eisenhower finally called it.

The defences that Rommel had erected on the Atlantic Wall were as good as anyone could have built.

However, in the end, the resources he had at his command could not halt the massive flotilla that had been assembled on the southern coast of England.

Stalin had finally got the second front in Europe that he had been banging the table about for over two years.

The Wehrmacht would use the Bocage to their advantage quite brilliantly in the months after D-Day, but all they could do was delay the inevitable.

The rest is rather imperfectly understood history.

WW2 revivalism is a massive theme in contemporary Britain, especially in England.

There were many references made to those years during the Brexit referendum in 2016 and since.

A perfect antidote to that worldview would be Peter Hitchen’s “The Phoney Victory”.

It can be argued with some validity that D-Day was the last time that Britain truly mattered in a global geopolitical sense.

That is probably the real reason that the British elite and, indeed, many of the common folk of Britain are so fascinated by this event.

I suppose when you have become the Sevco of Europe all you have left is to look back and reminisce on a self-serving view of the past.

That actually does a disservice to those brave soldiers on all sides who died 75 years ago today.

The European Union is the outworking of a peace process that started amid a continent poisoned by division and ruined by war.

Sadly, that view is severely in rationed in Britain today.