Heather Nauert is right about D-Day’s positive historical dimension in the U.S. relationship with Germany.
I note this in reference to Nauert’s comment on Tuesday, when the State Department acting undersecretary of state for public affairs suggested that the D-Day landings were evidence of a strong U.S. relationship with Germany. Considering that the D-Day landings directly led to the collapse of the German government in power at the time, Nauert’s comment raised some eyebrows.
But as I say, Nauert is right.
Because in coordination with the Allied invasion of Italy in September 1943 and the ensuing invasion of southern France in August 1944, D-Day led not only to Germany’s liberation from Nazism, but also its salvation from total Soviet annihilation.
To understand why most German historians would now speak fondly of D-Day, recall the situation on June 5, 1944. On the eastern front, the German army was under relentless pressure. While its army groups were holding territory with remarkable effectiveness, hundreds of massed Soviet divisions meant the outcome was inevitable. Evidencing as much, two weeks after D-Day, the Soviets began Operation Bagration. With vast numerical advantages in forces and equipment, the Soviets had broken the back of Germany’s Army Group-Center by August and began the final envelopment of Germany.
But if that envelopment would be the ultimate cause of Nazi Germany’s collapse, the advancing Allied armies who had landed at D-Day would be the German people’s salvation. After all, the disparity between Soviet treatment of German prisoners and civilians and the U.S. and British treatment of the Germans was wide indeed. Infuriated by their extraordinary war losses at German hands and only temperamentally restrained by their commanders, Soviet ground forces killed, looted, and raped their way through millions of Germans. My grandfather was a U.S. Army noncommissioned officer in Berlin after the war (as shown below: a photo of him playing baseball in Berlin in 1951!), and today at 93 years of age, he is still moved by the stories women in Berlin told him.
Were it not for Allied group commander Omar Bradley and his aggressive army commanders George Patton and Courtney Hodges, the Germans would have suffered much worse than they did. Evidencing as much, the widespread westward defection of German forces and civilians towards Allied lines in the latter stages of the war was not coincidental.
So, yes, D-Day led to the end of a despicable German government. But it also led to most Germans being saved from the Red onslaught. The defensive lines created by the partition of Germany would maintain a democratic peace in western Europe for the next forty-five years.
