“Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day…”
The sight of aging D-Day veterans this week made me think of Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” because truly heroic feats were done that June 6, 1944, day by the amphibious, airborne, and aviation assault forces.
Yet a key lesson of D-Day’s 75th anniversary should also be the day’s moral import in our consideration of war. After all, D-Day proves that killing people is sometimes not simply necessary, but also inherently moral.
The fighting at Normandy was brutal. It involved frontal assaults on reinforced German firing positions. And it required the annihilation of those positions in true infantry force tradition: close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver. Amid a lack of effective overwhelming support fire, the costs to Allied ground forces were high. More than 4,000 soldiers would die on June 6. There was little choice but to accept these costs and to kill the more than 1,000 Axis soldiers who died that day.
While disorganized, Adolf Hitler’s Army Command-West knew that it had to pen the Allies as close to the shore as possible in order to restrain further inland offensives. Had the Allies not pursued the enemy with such lethal aggression on June 6 and in the days following, the Germans might well have pushed the liberators back up against and into the English Channel.
Killing Germans and their Axis allies, then, was key to victory. Over the next seven weeks, many more Germans would have to die in order for the Allies to finally break out from Normandy and storm across France. Hundreds of thousands more Axis forces would have to die before victory in Europe was finally achieved the following summer.
Towards the liberation of a world and the ending of a genocide, D-Day was thus a day of great but moral brutality. We should never forget that, had those men failed to kill the enemy, the enemy would have prevailed.
