Normandy, 1944

In a few months, it will be the seventy-ninth anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy. The youngest surviving Allied veterans who fought in them are now 96, and the vast majority of their fellow soldiers have already departed this life. Over 4,000, mostly American and Canadian, departed on June 6, 1944 itself, along with many thousands of Germans.

The land and the sea still bear traces of the battles. On the beach at Arromanches, and just offshore, sit the massive concrete remains of the artificial harbor built to land men, materiel, and vehicles on this stretch of Norman shore – ultimately half a million vehicles in the months of June and July of 1944. On the wind-scoured clifftop of the Pointe du Hoc, the ground is still torn up by the craters from the allied shelling on June 6, some of them close to ten feet deep. In another month, they will fill with wildflowers, which will combine with the remnants of German pillboxes to form a sort of weird, wonderful installation art. Early in the morning of June 6, 225 American rangers scaled the cliff under heavy fire to take out the German artillery they thought – wrongly, as it turned out – was positioned on the top, threatening both Utah and Omaha Beaches. Only 90 survived the day unscathed.

A few miles away, at Colleville, lie long, sober lines of white crosses, broken here and there by stars of David, in the American military cemetery. Beyond, green grass gives way to a low wall, scrub, sand, and the blue sea beyond. It is indescribably beautiful and immensely moving. The German military cemetery at nearby La Cambe is more somber and more problematic. There, dark crosses stand in groups of five, and in one corner one can see the stone marking the final resting place of Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann. Just four days after the Allied landings, he commanded the Nazi forces who carried out a massacre in the southwestern French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, shooting close to 200 men, and burning over 400 women and children alive in the village church. Transferred to Normandy, he was killed by an American tank on June 29.

The sheer scale of the landings, and of the subsequent Normandy campaign, are stunning. Still more stunning is the fact that, despite the scale, it represents only one relatively small, if strategically critical, corner of the unbelievably massive conflagration we call World War II, with its over sixty million dead. In Europe, the numbers of military personnel involved in opening up this new Western front were outnumbered by those, at the same moment, fighting on the Eastern front as the Soviet Union knocked the Axis out of its remaining occupied territories in Operation Bagration. And, of course, fighting was also continuing in Italy, in southeastern Europe, throughout much of southeast Asia, across vast swathes of the Pacific Ocean, and in the air, as the Germans made their last efforts to bomb allied territory, and the allies reduced city after city in Germany and Japan to rubble, ash, and bone.

We think we have seen enormous material progress since the end of the war, and of course we have, but the fact is that no country on earth is now capable of the sort of industrial efforts seen during World War II. Consider that by the end of the war, American shipyards were taking a median 39 days each to construct “Liberty Ships” that could carry 10,000 tons of cargo. We ultimately made some 2,710 of them. In the summer of 1942, General Franz Halder told Hitler that the Soviets were building 1,200 tanks a month, in comparison with Germany’s 500. Hitler called the number ridiculously exaggerated. In fact, the Soviets were building 2,400 tanks a month. Presumably, during an extended period of military emergency, contemporary societies would retool to come back to this level of production, but they are nowhere near it today. Russia in particular seems (thankfully) incapable of matching its Soviet predecessor in this regard. It is one principal reason why, despite the horrors of the Russia-Ukraine war, the fighting remains on a considerably lower scale than World War II.

Make no mistake: World War II was a horror, and it brutalized all the societies that took part in it. But there was a (much) greater evil: a criminal German government that, during the war, carried out the greatest crimes in human history, and would have done far worse still if not stopped by the allies, both Western and Eastern. We can—we should—talk frankly about everything the allies did, including the firebombing of enemy cities, the lack of action to save Europe’s Jews, and the gross violations of civil rights at home. But we should not talk about these things independently from the larger context of what the war meant, and what the world would have looked like if the Axis had won. And we should be infinitely grateful to those who lie under the white crosses and stars at Coleville, by the sea.

These thoughts come to mind at the end of the better part of a week guiding a group of 14 students – 9 of them ROTC cadets – around Normandy in the company of a History Department colleague, a graduate student, and the Lieutenant Colonel and Master Sergeant of the Princeton Army ROTC Battalion. The students did the university proud and were themselves visibly moved by what they saw. I wish we could bring all the students there, to see, and to ponder.