Seventy-five years ago, my local pub was the scene of a lethal gunfight. Southern England had been turned into the largest armed camp in the history of the world, as 2 million men, predominantly British, American, and Canadian, massed for the Normandy landings.
You can’t gather so many young men together without tensions. One night, a confrontation between American soldiers and military police in the village where I live, Kingsclere in Hampshire, led to a prolonged exchange of gunfire which left two GIs dead along with the pub landlady, who was hit by a ricochet while she picked up empty glasses.
The whole affair was hushed up. The last thing anyone wanted on the eve of the D-Day invasion was a story about American soldiers shooting at each other. The fact that the two dead privates, Joseph Coates and Jacob Anderson, were black, made the authorities treat the matter even more sensitively. Eisenhower personally ordered a news blackout and sent his second-in-command to apologize to the villagers.
There are a thousand such stories around D-Day, whose 75th anniversary falls on Thursday. It was perhaps the greatest military endeavor ever undertaken. An opposed amphibious landing is every strategist’s nightmare, and the Germans had four years to get ready. Their Atlantic Wall ran from Norway to Spain, with especially heavy fortifications in northern France. The beaches bristled with mines, booby traps, barbed wire, and machine-gun emplacements. And behind those defenses stood Erwin Rommel, arguably the greatest general of his age. Every soldier training for the assault knew how bad the odds were.
What prompted those young men to cross the Atlantic, as their fathers had done a quarter of a century before? The short answer is that, in both cases, Germany had declared war on the United States. But that does not quite satisfy as an explanation. Why, after all, did Hitler declare war following Pearl Harbor? The only answer that makes sense is that he had made the same calculation as the Kaiser a generation earlier, namely that the English-speaking peoples were bound to stick together in the end, so Germany might as well strike first.
President Trump is making a state visit to the United Kingdom to coincide with the anniversary. It will be an especially poignant commemoration this year — the last one that surviving veterans will be able to attend in any number.
As the old men gather on the beaches, we should ponder the extraordinary power of the Anglosphere in arms. We should acknowledge the depth of feeling that unites the English-speaking nations. Look at the countries that most regularly line up alongside the U.S., not just in the two world wars, but in the conflicts that came afterwards, from Korea to Iraq and Afghanistan. Though the coalitions shift each time, the same core nations keep featuring: the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
Is their alliance based simply on affinity of blood and speech? Hardly. All of them, these days, are countries with mixed, immigrant-descended populations. Even in 1944, Americans were far more likely to have German than British ancestry. Their commander was called Eisenhower, for Heaven’s sake. And many of the soldiers, like Pvts. Coates and Anderson, had no direct ethnic connection to either side. No, it was something more than language that drew our countries together.
A constant Allied refrain through the war was that they were fighting “for freedom.” Theirs was the side that elevated the individual above the collective, that raised the law above the government, that defined government as a servant rather than a ruler. And that, broadly speaking, is what the Anglosphere nations have stood for ever since.
During World War II, there were tensions between Washington and London. Roosevelt hoped that the conflict would end the British Empire, as indeed it did. But his successors quickly found that the U.S. had to step into Britain’s shoes as the country that was ready to deploy force against tyranny, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. Just like the British, the Americans found themselves resented by the countries they had defended, whether from Soviet subversion or domestic despotism. It was exactly as the British poet Rudyard Kipling had promised in 1899 when, following the American absorption of the Philippines, he told the U.S. that its reward would be “the blame of those ye better, the hate of those ye guard.”
Blamed and hated, the U.S. carried on anyway, promoting open societies, private property, and free trade. When I look at the alternative superpower candidates, I can only say, with particular vehemence on this 75th anniversary, God bless America.
