Don’t forget D-Day, or what led to the Second World War
By the chance of the calendar, my publishing date falls on June 6, 74 years after the invasion of Normandy. On that morning, some 150,000 Allied troops were launched into France by sea and air to bring an end to the Nazi occupation of Western Europe.
Canada had its own beach, Juno, along the other four: Gold and Sword for Britain, Utah and Omaha for the United States. Less than a year later, fascist Germany would surrender unconditionally to the Allies.
D-Day, and the Second World War generally, have been the subject of thousands of books, films, and speeches, as well as artistic expressions spanning from plays to video games. I cannot hope to add anything meaningful in these categories, but I remain convinced that both the heroism the Allies exhibited, and the causes of the war, must be recalled.
Sir Winston Churchill, prime minister of the U.K. almost exactly as long as Britain was at war with Germany, wrote in his own brilliant memoirs on the conflict that the Second World War was the unnecessary war; this phrasing sounds odd today, especially in light of the unimaginable evil that took place in death camps run by the Axis. But what Churchill meant was such evil was not inevitable – it was the direct result of ineffectually political policy.
Germany, humiliated but not occupied after the First World War, went home frustrated and forced to pay according to Versailles.
And while Germany clearly ought to still have a Kaiser today – how long is Merkel staying anyway? – it was set up as a republic with so many devils in the details of its constitution, the government was very easily stymied by small factions. Add to this economic collapse by inflation and the Depression – voila, war-mongering populism is born.
Adolf Hitler’s legacy is well known, but it cannot be understated that he was typical of the time regarding the people groups he blamed; between the pathetic Weimar Republic as well as the Allies refusing to enforce the terms of Versailles regarding German militarism, the movement he didn’t even invent – National-Socialism – grew until he became the political master of Germany.
Another point cannot be missed here – and must be taken to heart particularly by those of us who have any sympathy for statecensorship of speech: Weimar Germany had every kind of hatespeech law and prison term to enforce them the hard left praises today; all it did was make Hitler a martyr and give him time to write his opus in prison.
His evil genius plans needed to be countered and discredited in open debate – instead, they were left to fester and grow. We know the rest of the story: a few years of propaganda, profiling people groups, the slow but steady cheapening of human life through abortion and euthanasia, glorification of state power in the Fuhrer, and suddenly the world fell back into an even deeper chaos than the First World War. It started with back to work programs and ended with the gas chambers – all thanks to weakkneed politicians from Berlin to Washington and beyond who refused to push back.
As to the heroism of the Allies, including the Russians who suffered 27 million dead, it can be well observed, especially in films and series depicting the war. And we ought to dwell on how many were willing to sacrifice everything for the defeat of evil, from the highest levels of strategy to the bravery in battle shown by men-atarms on sea, land, and in the air against the most vicious foes the world had ever seen. Please take a moment today to remember them.
In the end, war is a brutal laboratory, a way of proving a hypothesis of who is strong and who is weak – perhaps even what world opinion will endure. The Second World War is proof that the Allies were strong enough to defeat the Axis, relatively quickly; but that conflict also shows us the price of appeasement and complacency: over 80 million dead, because we failed to act.
It started with back to work programs and ended with the gas chambers – all thanks to weakkneed politicians from Berlin to Washington and beyond who refused to push back.