Anniversaries are important.
Today, the world commemorates Operation Overlord, the Allied landings on the Normandy coast on June 6th 1944, aka D-Day.
This was a huge undertaking of ingenuity, organisation, bravery and deception.
The Brits provided most of the latter.
This was the moment when Albion’s perfidiousness was, briefly, on the right side of history.
Rommell thought Normandy was always the likely landing spot because of its similarity to Anzio at low tide.
However, Hitler was convinced that the main force would use the shortest route, Pas de Calais.
The ruse worked.
As in many military operations, weather can be a crucial hinge factor.
Anyone who thinks that the Irish Free State was, in any meaningful way, “neutral” is historically illiterate.
D-Day was probably the last time that Britain was central to world events, and quite clearly, the operation couldn’t have happened without the island being the staging area for the invasion force.
The fact that the overall commander, Eisenhower, was an American wasn’t incidental.
He wrote the letter to the invasion force as FDR’s man on the ground.
The British were already junior partners in the emerging new world order.
By the end of WW2, there could be no doubt that the world had two superpowers, and Britain wasn’t one of them.
Today, any claim that the Brits are a major player in the world is about as authentic as the medals worn by Charles Saxe-Coburg Gotha.
Like all contests, resources are crucial.
Unsurprisingly, it is usually the side with the most stuff that prevails.
The scale of D-Day and Operation Iceberg, the invasion of Okinawa the following April, showed that the United States had unrivalled industrial power.
As the troops were landing on the Normandy beaches, the biggest army in the world was already well into Operation Bagration, but even the Soviet Union needed American help.
The Red Army could not have achieved its success on the eastern front without all those Chrysler trucks supplied by Uncle Sam.
After the war, Britain wasn’t a serious player.
It ended a period in world history where the neighbouring island was the centre of the first truly transglobal imperium.
Now, they’re the Sevco of Europe.
In the post-Brexit dispensation, their economy is self-harming, and they seem to go through Prime Ministers at a hilarious rate.
Liz Truss.
Really?
Today, their airborne forces are passport paratroopers being checked by French authorities.
You can’t be too careful these days…
Like the mythology around the Battle of Britain, the British political elite look back to WW2 with a deep sense of nostalgia because that was when Britain mattered.
It doesn’t anymore, and seventy years after its conclusion, it partly explains the Brexit vote among the children of VE night.
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Then there was the Katyn massacre of Polish officers that they tried to pin on the Nazi’s.
However,the Brits and the Yanks can’t take the moral high ground over anything Stalin did.
Dirty tricks and treachery…..Don’t get me started !
The Poles always had two enemies in WW2.
See the “liberation” of Israeli hostages have glossed over the atrocities that achieved the mission – what a shower.
Charger – I looked for the source but couldn’t find it, but yes, I agree. I remember reading the same thing. While unarmed frontline soldiers ran at enemy guns with instructions to pick up any weapon dropped by a shot compatriot, Stalin was indulging his paranoia.
It is ironic that Britain is commemorating its role in helping to liberate people living in the countries that had been occupied by Nazi Germany, while ,at the same time, supporting a country that is killing civilians in the territories it has occupied in Palestine
I wished they’d stop rattling on about their 55, I mean, war. It’s all they have left to hang on to.
Sevco nation, spot on Phil
Russia lost an estimated 24m people in WW2
The UK and US lost less than 1m combined
So when they go on about how “they” beat Hitler and how we should never forget the sacrifice they made ask them why they have forgotten the sacrifices of the Russian people without whom the US/UK would not of been on the winning side either .
Soviet losses, both military and civilian, were appalling.
Well Said Phil,……
How many were killed BY Stalin during the war years [estimates say over 1.5m died in his Gulags] and not as a result of participating in The Great patriotic War?
Can’t for the life of me remember where, but I recall reading somewhere, that Stalin executed more officers above the rank of Major than were killed in combat.
There is a point in there that you are missing i wont embaress you .
Killed by disease before the Soviets created their own antibiotics in the early fifties.We already had antibiotics but wouldn’t give them to the Soviets.So Stalin didn’t kill 1.5 million